How to Restore Deleted Facebook Messenger Messages

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One fine day, you open your Facebook messenger and the accidentally deleted messages pull the group from underneath you. Well, we have come up with easy ways to help you restore the ground as well as your messages.

Nowadays under lockdown, the use of social media is reaching new milestones. Chatting has become an integral part of our daily conversations. In fact, it’s the most preferred medium of communication for the youth. The messages from our loved ones to the ones that contain useful information about work, it can be really disarming if they get deleted somehow. 

It’s really difficult to retrieve the data once lost. Facebook Messenger is one such platform that allows you to chat with your Facebook friends. It’s always advisable to create a backup of your chats and data whenever possible. There can be many instances where your messages are removed accidentally and it wreaks havoc on your mental peace. Since it’s a common problem, we decided to address this and give some troubleshooting tips so as to let you overcome this dreadful situation in just a few steps.

1. Unarchiving Chats

The settings and various facilities that modern applications provide can help us sort our problems and issues that arise regarding privacy, data safety etc. but it can lead to few challenges due to ignorance of the technicalities. One such feature is the facility to archive your chats as well. Archived chats aren’t visible in the usual chat box. You have to access them separately under the archived message tab. 

Now there can be times when you must accidentally archive your chats instead of deleting them. In case this happens, it’s a cakewalk to retrieve those messages. You simply have to unarchive those chats. The steps are as follows:

• Open Facebook Messenger on your device and head to your recent conversations. 

•  Click on the search bar to search the conversation that you previously archived. 

• Once you find the conversation, simply select it and press the Unarchive Message option to unarchive it.
  
  

2. Use Facebook Settings

In case you didn’t archive your messages but actually deleted them from your device, there is another way to get back your important messages with the help of Facebook settings. To use this method, you must have a desktop or PC. Facebook knows that it’s possible that people delete their data by mistake which can land them up in problems as those messages can contain useful information as well. So Facebook stores literally all the data about whatever you post, comment or any XYZ activity you perform on the app. The steps for this method are really simple:

• Log in to your Facebook account on the desktop. 

• Go to Settings > General Account Settings. 

• Select “Your Facebook Information” option from the left panel. 

• Select “Download your information” option from the right panel. 

•  Here select the “Messages” option and tap on the “Create file” button. 

•  Once you click on this button, it will complete the process, send you a notification to help you download the file. 

• Click on this notification and tap on the Download button next to the File you want to download.

• It would ask you to enter your password to ensure security. After entering the password it would open a new window asking you to save the file on your PC.

• A download link will be sent to your associated email ID. Click on the ‘Download Archive’ button, and everything will be taken down on your device.

• Unzip the folder and find the ‘Index’ file that contains all your Facebook Data > Choose ‘Messages’, you’ll be now able to see all your deleted Facebook messages.

After following these steps, you can easily access your messages through your Android device, now that they are available offline on PC.

3. Connecting Android Device to PC

You don’t usually use Facebook on your web browser. It’s more feasible with the application on your phone. There are many people who don’t want to switch on to their PC, again and again, to access their data that they have retrieved from the settings, there’s another way to access your files. For that, you need to connect your Android device to your computer with the help of a USB cable. Once you have connected and done with the setup, follows these steps:

• Go to “SD Card” or “Internal Storage”. 

•  Select Android > Data. 

• Look for the “com.facebook.orca” folder over there and select it. 

• Afterwards, go to Cache > fb_temp. 

•  Here, look for messages that you want to recover and follow the process to recover it. 

If using a PC doesn’t suit you, you can access the same folders through the file explorer of your phone as well and follow the aforementioned process to get your desired results. Although it’s easier to process data on PC as it supports more file formats than what your cell phone algorithm does. This stored data can now be accessed by your phone itself and you won’t need to log onto your PC repeatedly in order to check out individual files that were removed by mistake.

4. Use of Third Party Applications

There is a possibility that these methods that are mentioned above can seem cumbersome to many users who aren’t that tech-savvy or don’t want to go through such internal elaborate processes to restore their messages. After all, it is sort of long and difficult for those who aren’t very familiar with the working of android systems. These applications, like any other app, have made our lives a lot easier. They can help you restore your messages. Although most of the apps need to be installed before the messages are deleted. It’s usually not possible to get back the data from these apps that were lost before they were installed.

There are many tools such as 'Stellar Data Recovery for Android'. You can find many such on Playstore easily. The advantages they provide are many. These are dedicated tools to recover your lost or deleted messages, contacts, photos, videos, and other multimedia from Android devices. They allow previews of the data to be restored so that we can don’t know what we want to keep or remove. These advanced apps or software provide a seamless user experience on any said platform like Microsoft, iOS, Android etc.

So these are the easiest ways to recover your deleted Messenger messages. Now you don’t have to fear the fatal accident of your precious messages being deleted. The technology has developed to a great extent. It has become very easy to track your data and store them online. Lost data can be retrieved more effortlessly. You just need to have a little bit of awareness and you can protect and transfer your data easily cross-platform and cross-application.

Written by – Saakshi Priyadarshini

Edited by - Sravanthi Cheerladinne