How to Recover Deleted Facebook Messages – 5 tips

This article is about how to Recover Deleted Facebook Messages. It happens to everyone: you’ve browsed your message history, but the message you’re looking for isn’t there. For some reason you deleted it. And now you want to go back.

Once you delete a Facebook message, it will be fine, at least from a strict Facebook Messenger perspective. But there are things you can do to retrieve those messages from other sources, such as your app cache, memory, or previous Facebook Messenger downloads.

How to Recover Deleted Facebook Messages

Here are some ways to recover deleted Facebook messages, and back up your messages so you don’t lose them in the future:

1. View your archived conversations

If you keep those messages instead of deleting them, you can easily retrieve them because Facebook still keeps your saved chats.

1. Open the Messenger desktop, web or mobile app.
2. In the chat section of the app, type the name of the person you are talking to in the search bar.
3. Then click or tap their name to open a conversation and see everything.

Quick tip: If you don’t want to see certain chats in your Messenger inbox, but you’re not sure whether to delete them, consider saving the messages instead of deleting them.

2. Ask the recipient for a copy or screenshot of the message or conversation

When you delete a message, it only happens at your end.

The person you’re talking to will still be able to see it, so they can help you fill the gap if they don’t delete it on their end.

3. Check if your Facebook message has been sent to your email address

This only works if all email notifications are enabled for your account.

But if you are enabled, you will be able to search for conversations or messages in your email account.

4. Use Android File Manager

If you use an Android device and have Messenger installed, your device may have these messages deleted from the app’s cache.

You can get it using any Android file manager, and if you don’t have one installed, you can find many of them in the App Store.

1. Open the File Manager app on your Android device.

2. Go to folder > com.facebook.natel > fb_temp

3. You will see messages from your recent history, and hopefully your deleted messages will be among them.

5. Download your Facebook messages/information

Backing up your Facebook information, including your messages, is a good idea if you don’t want to lose anything.

Using the desktop app or browser version, go to your Facebook settings. You can also access these settings in the Messenger app on iOS.

On the Your Facebook Information tab on the left side, click Download Your Information.

Under the Select file option heading, make sure that you have selected the date range from the last drop-down list.

To access just your message, click Leave all under Select message to download topic and check the box next to More message.

Scroll to the start of your download topic and click Request Download. Facebook will send you the file once it’s ready to view.