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Losing data from your phone is heartbreaking. Whether you inadvertently delete something or have your phone stolen or damaged, your irreplaceable photos, contents from loved ones, and more could disappear in a moment.
If you need to recover some text contents from your Android phone, you’re probably urgently looking for the best solution to do so. Here’s what you need to know about how to recover deleted texts, and how to back them up to prevent this in the future.
How to Recover Deleted Text Messages on Android
We’ll start with the bad news: there’s really no dependable course to recover deleted texts on Android if you didn’t prepare beforehand.
Before we move onto some tools, don’t forget the low-tech solution for this problem: questioning the other party. If you only lost a few text messages, the person you were texting might still have copies of those texts on their telephone. They can send these to you or take screenshots of them.
Failing this, nonetheless, you might think to turn to recovery apps. Perform a Google search for how to retrieve deleted texts, and you’ll come across a variety of websites offering Android convalescence software.
The problem is that these tools won’t work for most people. We tested Mobikin, FonePaw Android Recovery, and EaseUS MobiSaver. Each of them failed to recover data due to at least one of three large-scale limits 😛 TAGEND
You need root access to recover text contents. The tools don’t actually recover anything without paying. They ask you to use the unavailable USB Mass Storage protocol.
Let’s discuss each of these drawbacks in turn.
Drawback 1: Root Access Needed
Rooting your Android phone renders, among other benefits, the ability to access any file on your machine. By default, Android conceals some protected structure folders from you. The folder that contains your texts falls into this category. Thus, you can’t install a normal file browser app and browsing to the directory containing your texts without rooting.
Whenever you progress through one of these text recovery programs, they’ll generally check for root access. Without it, they can’t do much. When testing Mobikin, we hop-skip the root prompting and terminated up at a blank answers screen. FonePaw attempted to perform a temporary root, which causes Android to display a security warning.
While a temporary root reverts after you reboot, this is still an invasive( yet unfortunately necessary) pace for these apps to take. And permanently rooting generally necessitates unlocking your bootloader, which erases the data on your telephone. You might not want to root your telephone for security reasons, plus most people don’t really need to do it anymore.
Thus, requiring root access avoids most people from applying these recovery tools.
Drawback 2: Recovery Isn’t Free
Even if you have a rooted phone or don’t mind the temporary root, you’ll be in for a scandalize when you actually try to restore texts. These tools are all quite similar and offering” free trials” that do virtually nothing other than check for deleted files. You’ll need to pay a high price ($ 40 – $50 or more) in order to actually recover anything.
Most people probably won’t want to pay that kind of money to recover a few texts. Of track, you presuppose the app founders are trustworthy with your payment, and that the software actually operates if you pay.
If you do decide to take a chance on paying for these apps, you must act quickly. When you delete data on Android, your telephone markings the space where that data lived as available for new information. This is necessary that the longer you use your phone after deletion, the most likely that the deleted texts will be overwritten.
To maximize your chances of recovery, you should put your phone in airplane mode and evaded employing it as much as possible until you’ve attempted to get them back.
Drawback 3: USB Mass Storage Isn’t Available
Faced with these limitations, you might consider using a PC record convalescence tool like Recuva. Connecting your telephone to your computer should let you scan it for deleted files, right? Unfortunately, this is a dead end too.
When you connect your Android phone to a PC, you can choose from several protocols to use. Modern devices typically use MTP( Media Transfer Protocol) or PTP( Picture Transfer Protocol ). Ancient Android devices( older than 4. x Ice Cream Sandwich) use a different protocol known as USB Mass Storage( UMS ).
UMS is the same protocol that burst drives use when be linked to a PC. It shapes their contents altogether available to the host computer. The problem is that the host machine needs exclusive access to the connected machine when using UMS.
Thus, when browsing your phone’s files via your PC, you can’t use your phone at the same time. In the past, this caused problems with Android system folders, plus it entailed Android had to use the FAT file system, which is slow and outdated.
All this said, Android doesn’t support UMS anymore. Thus, you can’t application a programme designed like Recuva to recover files from a machine connected with MTP or PTP. It won’t even see your device. EaseUs MobiSaver asked us to enable UMS, but this just isn’t possible on modern Android phones.
There is a silver lining: if your telephone has an SD card, you can remove it and threw it in your PC use a built-in slot or an external reader. From there, Recuva can work its magic. However, few Android phones store text contents on the SD card. Thus, you won’t be able to recover anything from your card in most cases.
How to Back Up and Restore Android Text Messages 
While you’re generally out of luck for recovering text messages, the good news is that backing them up is simple. Take a few minutes to set up an automatic backup plan today, and you’ll never have to worry about how to retrieve deleted contents again.
For easily backing up text contents, a free app called SMS Backup& Restore is your best bet. It’s easy to set up, extends on a schedule, and backs up to cloud storage. If you want to back up everything at once, try another top Android backup app.
After installing it, devote it permission to access your info. Then tap Set up a backup on the main screen. You can choose to back up phone calls in addition to texts, if you like. Tap Advanced Options to enable backing up MMS and emoji, or back up only certain conversations.
Next, select where you’d like to back up to. The app corroborates Google Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive, and storing locally on your phone. You shouldn’t back up to your phone, though: if it was stolen or destroyed, you wouldn’t have any style to recover the contents. Tap your opted service, then you’ll need to connect your account and elect how long to keep backups.
Finally, choose how often to perform the backup. Daily is a fine interval for most; you can pick Hourly for improved protection. When you’re done, tap Back up now to start a backup and planned it. Your contents are now protected.
You can slide out the left menu in the app and tap View backups to make sure they’re working. Choose Restore from this menu when you need to recover messages.
Download: SMS Backup& Restore( Free)
Your Android Texts, Protected for Good
While the Android text recovery scene isn’t great, thankfully backing up is easy. If there was a perfect way to recover old messages, we’d be happy to share it with you. As is, though, a combination of Android limitations and expensive recovery tools mean that you can’t recover contents without paying a significant amount of money and modifying your phone.
For better texting, check out the best alternative SMS apps for Android.
Image Credit: londondeposit/ Depositphotos
Read the full section: How to Recover Deleted Text Messages on Android
Read more: makeuseof.com
