An Important Lesson On Apple iPhone Updates
My precious messages were wiped. Don’t let it happen to you.

June 14, 2012
I had just arrived at Hannah’s graduation ceremony when my phone vibrated, announcing a new text message. It was my Dad saying something to the effect of ‘Your mother has taken a turn for the worst. I’ll keep you posted.’
My Mum had been on death’s doorstep many times before. When I moved to live at the other end of New Zealand after graduating from nursing school, I dropped everything and ‘ran’ home several times because her health status looked grim.
Her numerous falls and accidents related to care negligence and her general failing health were a cause of concern for all of us. Miraculously, Mum always came around — so much so that I expected her to resurrect herself this time.
She didn’t.
When my Mum died in June 2012, I purposely kept the message I sent to all my close friends to announce the sad news of her passing. In return, I received many replies voicing love and support that were appreciated and helped me through a tough time. I was in a challenging spot; I was thousands of miles away from New Zealand, had just started a new work contract, and knew I couldn’t make it home for her funeral.
Words of sorrow and personal reflection about how my mum had impacted my friend's lives helped soothe those initial unforgiving thoughts of finality that I would never see my Mum again.
Inexplicably, the message disappeared
A couple of years ago — nine years since she passed — I was scrolling through my phone and almost panicked when I noticed that precious message was missing. Because it was the first message of at least fifty from various contacts — and several years since my mum passed — I rarely scrolled down to read it.
I didn’t need to. Simply knowing it was there was a comfort. Although I had written that message years ago, I couldn’t delete it, just like I still can’t delete Mum from my contact list. The group text message I had sent was a moment to cherish forever—a tangible reminder of Mum’s death and my kind and thoughtful friends.
When I discovered the message was gone, I blamed myself. Although I didn’t recall deleting the message, I couldn’t rationalize who else would’ve. No one uses my phone except me — and I have been known to delete things unintentionally!
It wasn’t until last year, when another special message disappeared that I started thinking something else was up.
My dearest friend passed in October 2021
It’s a day I can’t ever forget as it is thwarted with guilt, anger, horror, sadness, and pain. A day of ‘I wish’ and ‘If only’s.’
When my phone started buzzing late at night with an ‘unknown number’ signaled on my screen, my gut instinct knew it was not good news. My friend, Brad*, was in the Coronary Care Unit at one of our trauma centers awaiting a Trans-catheter Aortic Valve Implantation (TAVI) procedure. He had severe aortic valve stenosis, a narrowing in a critical structure that ensures adequate blood perfusion from the left ventricle of the heart to the body.
The reason Brad didn’t pick up my call en route home from the hospital 30 minutes earlier was now made telepathically clear with a screen, a vibrating phone, and, seconds later, a voice.
Brad was dead.
I hung onto his last messages too.
I never wrote them down, assuming they would be there on my phone forever. His last one was particularly haunting. I texted him on my supper break to see how he was doing. The response was something to the effect of, “I feel like I’m in prison. I can see the sun but can’t feel its warmth.”
Last year as we mourned his first anniversary, I reached for my phone to ‘connect’ with him again. Our last exchange — and every single text we had over the years — were gone.
It was at this point I knew it wasn’t me deleting messages and started investigating further.
Technology bites
I told my more-up-with-tech-stuff- son about my dilemma of disappearing messages. He immediately suspected it was something to do with the settings on my phone rather than silly ol’ me.
I’ll ‘fess that I’m not one to purchase a product and come home and read the instruction manual. I’ve been an iPhone girl since the Nokia flip phone became gauche, and after some momentary fiddling to get a new phone up and running, it’s business as usual. I make calls, text, and take photos; I seldom look at my settings and anything new or fancy the phone can do.
After much sleuthing, it turns out that he was right. At some point, Apple initiated a feature in one of their more recent iOS updates to delete inactive messaging threads or remove messages from active threads over a year old.
I’m not entirely sure when this feature was added, as it doesn’t appear to be listed in any of their ‘iOS press releases.’ To support this article — like every good writer should if making blanket statements — I’ve spent hours combing through pages of notifications regarding new Apple features and bug fixes, but I’ve drawn a blank — except for this:

That’s a very clear piece of information regarding the auto-deletion of podcasts, but unless I missed it, there was nothing about adding a setting regarding the storage and deletion of messages.
There seem to be several articles that come up on Google when searching for answers about iPhone messages suddenly disappearing. Clearly, I am not the only one who didn’t get the memo who is affected by this issue.
Why would Apple create this new feature?
Many of the tech replies insinuate message auto-deletion occurs if the phone's storage capacity is full. Alternatively, they suggest the feature for selecting a time frame to preserve messages needs to be changed. That’s all well and good if you know about the feature! It appears that whenever it was initiated, the default setting was to preserve messages for one year. One has to manually change it to ‘forever’ — which I have now done.
That will explain why my message about my Mum magically disappeared after being there for years and Brad’s a year after he died.

I’m presuming it is a means of reducing cloud junk. We are all guilty of having hundreds of messages, either in text or email form, photos, videos, documents and files that are floating out there in cyberspace.
There are many companies that offer iCloud services, with Amazon leading the pack in 2023. It takes a load of machines to store the data, and they’re not environmentally friendly. According to an article on the carbon footprint of data centers, they harm the planet with their greenhouse gas emissions due to their incredible demand for electricity and water to operate.
If data centers continue to use non-renewable electricity as an energy source, energy consumption is expected to quadruple by mid-century.
Data centers account for 2.5% to 3.7% of global GHG emissions.
Data center emissions exceed GHG emissions from the aviation industry (2.4%) and other activities that fuel the global economy.
I'm pleased if Apple was being environmentally conscious in initiating this deletion process — but it would have been nice to have been told. Google sent out copious warnings about their new stance of dealing with trashed mail and files; they are permanently deleted after 30 days.
My phone now indicates any deleted messages will be removed after ‘approximately 40 days,’ but those conversations are not the ones of concern. I’d already trashed them anyway.

Can I retrieve my messages?
No. They’re gone forever. It’s a hard pill to swallow.
All I can do is spread the word so that it doesn’t happen to you. Please check the settings on your phone by following these instructions — although, depending on your model and brand, they may differ. I’d welcome readers' comments to help those with other models or an Android device.


If you have any special messages, I’d suggest taking a screenshot too. I wish I had the sense to do this with Brad’s final message, especially knowing it was his last.
There is a silver lining to this story. Although I can’t retrieve those texts, just writing about those two tragic moments in my life when my Mum and best friend died reminds me why I am here on Medium.
Stories preserve memories.
*I have changed my friend’s name to protect his privacy.
If you would like to read more about my dear Mum and my friend please check out these stories.