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How to recover deleted SMS

Recover deleted SMS

With SIM Manager you can recover deleted SMS. This guide explains the technical details of the SMS recovery process. The table below summarizes the default settings for various mobile phones and how they affect your chance to undelete texts.

If your phone is not listed, there are some rules of thumb that will be helpful:

if the phone stores the SMS in its own memory, rather than on the SIM, recovering a deleted SMS is not possible;
check your phone's menu, if there is an option to copy the SMS from the phone's memory to the SIM card, then SMS recovery may be possible (provided that it was deleted from the SIM, rather than the phone's memory);
if the phone stores the SMS in the SIM by default, recovering a deleted SMS is most likely to be possible, but is not guaranteed.

Phone Model	Default storage	Recovery
iPhone	Phone	N/A
LG KU990 Viewty	SIM if there is free space	yes
Motorola A840	SIM if there is free space	yes
Motorola V500	SIM if there is free space	yes
Nokia 1110	SIM	yes
Nokia 1280	Phone	yes
Nokia 2600	Phone	N/A
Nokia 6230i	SIM if there is free space	N/A
Nokia n78	Phone	N/A
Nokia N91i	Phone	N/A
Samsung C200	SIM if there is free space	yes
Samsung D600E	Phone	N/A
Samsung x460	SIM if there is free space	N/A
Samsung X630	Phone	N/A
Sony Ericsson T630	Phone	N/A
Sony Ericsson W381i	Phone	N/A
Sony Ericsson W950	Phone	N/A

Note for iPhone owners - Apple's iPhone keeps the SMS in its own memory, rather than on the SIM card; therefore conventional recovery methods won't work. You should give a try to SIM Manager's "import from iTunes" feature, take a look at How to import contacts from iPhone to SIM card

Contributions to this list will be greatly appreciated.