Whether it’s a blessing or a curse, social media platforms provide us with revolutionary ways to connect. The features of these platforms, including Facebook, are constantly evolving to provide users with better ways to manage the content they create and share. One of these features is the ability to delete messages you’ve sent and received.
If you accidentally deleted Facebook messages and you want to see them again, here are some options in this article that can help you.
You Deleted That Important Message; What will happen now?
Better to tear off this Band-Aid right now: Once a message is gone, it’s gone forever. Deleting messages is designed to get rid of them forever. However, all is not lost; There are some ways to recover messages under very specific circumstances. Facebook’s official statement on the matter: “No, you cannot retrieve deleted messages or conversations.”
Before continuing, here’s some advice for you. There are many methods online that claim to recover your deleted messages. For the most part, they are not well-intentioned. You’ll find apps that promise to dig through your cached data, people who know supposedly “hackers” that can help, and many other such scams. These are halfway at best and dangerous at worst, so don’t try them. If a message is deleted without being archived, it is gone.
You’re out of luck if you don’t force it into the Facebook servers. Having said that, here’s what can be done if circumstances permit. One final asterisk – you can actually access messages deleted from Facebook servers by a court order. If you are in a serious legal dispute, you may have grounds for requesting it.
Receiving a Message from the Receiver
There is a distinction to be made between messages and chats. Messages are individual communications you send or receive from someone, while chats are the entire message log between you and that person. If you’re trying to retrieve an entire chat log that you deleted, you might be in luck.
There are obviously two sides to any conversation, so the chat log should still be available to the person receiving it. If that’s the case, reach out to that person and ask for a copy. You will learn how to retrieve chat logs later in this article.
You can also do this for individual messages, provided you only delete them at the end of the conversation. When you delete a message, Facebook will ask you if you want to remove the message from both chats or just yours.
An Ounce of Prevention Is Worth a Pound of Message
Now that you are aware that you have limited access to deleted messages, you can at least try to avoid some mistakes in the future. If you are trying to access messages deleted by others, you should now know that it is in vain.
The best advice we can give you to avoid this problem is: don’t delete messages. There is no practical reason to delete messages unless you are trying to delete sensitive information from Facebook messages which you should still try to avoid. Realistically, there is no limit to the number of messages you can send and receive.
If you come across a situation where you are overwhelmed with too many chat logs, archive some of them. Archiving ensures that chat logs no longer appear in your history. The benefit of doing this is that archived conversations can be retrieved fairly easily.
To archive a conversation, you must use the Facebook Messenger app or go to www.messenger.com and sign in with your Facebook credentials. You will see three horizontal dots next to each conversation, click that button to open a menu and select “Archive”. To retrieve archived conversations, click the cogwheel next to your name to access the settings menu and select “Archived Chats”.
Some Things Are Not To Be Found
Unfortunately, there is no great news about your lost messages. Therefore, avoid deleting messages completely or archive them if necessary.
If you only deleted messages on their side of the conversation, there may be hope by contacting the recipient. As a result, you should talk to your attorney about options for obtaining a court order if there are legal complications of some kind.
Did you delete some messages on purpose or is it a secret why they are gone? Have you tried getting them back? Maybe you know a method to get them back safely? Share your thoughts in the comments below.
