HELP! This morning I awoke to find that all of my old text messages on my Samsung 9+ - with the exception of the few that were starred - have disappeared. I have cleared the cache and restarted the phone several times, but no luck. Any thoughts or suggestions?
Do you, by chance, have "Delete old Messages" enabled in the Samsung Message settings (I assume you are using Samsung Messages)? If you do, your oldest messages will be deleted after you reach 200 texts. You can go to the settings and turn that off so it doesn't happen again. Also, there is a setting to keep deleted messages for 30 days, if that is off then they will be directly deleted, not sent to trash.
The only potentially useful advice I can offer would be to reset your phone and restore your GOOGLE backup (not the Samsung, which has probably already backed up minus the missing messages). The only time, unfortunately, you can restore a Google backup is upon first restart after a reset. You can try switching to Google messages first and see if they somehow come back. Whatever you decide, going forward, if your historical texts are important to you, download SMS backup and restore from the play store and set it to auto backup your messages periodically.
Unless you turned it off, your contacts automatically backup to Google. Google sync is the default when you get your phone. You can check by going to contacts.google.com. If they are there, you don't have to worry, they will come back with the restore of the Google backup. You can also check your photos are backed up in Google photos: photos.google.com. If you have your photos arranged in albums in your gallery, you might want to connect your phone to a PC (if you have one) or flash drive and transfer the files to a PC. You can also use Smart Switch to make sure you save any important stuff to a PC or flash drive, as you can selectively transfer. So you can choose to backup your contacts and photos and any important documents or even make a complete backup of everything on your phone, provided you have a drive big enough (Smart Switch will tell you how much storage you need after you select what you want backed up). It's not a bad idea to have at least one complete system backup.
In summer of 23 I finally upgreaded my S9 to this S23 and really liked it.... until text messages began to curiously dissappear. No aii.... and not always. I would wake up one day and parts of conversations were gone. Sometimes entire conversations were missing. I spoke to verizon on at leasr six occasions and they assured me it was not their network. They explained that since I was able to send text and receive texts and all of my texts were in their logs that once these texts were on my phone, it was then the responsibility of the telephone to maintain them.. i have then contacted Samsung support. Whereby they pointed the finger at Verizon, until the last episode. Where the technician tried everything in his bag of tricks, I can find no way to restore nor no reason that they should be missing. Imagine how infuriating it would be to suddenly find that important texts that contains important phone numbers and pictures. We're just gone, not to be restored.. so yesterday was the last draw after spending another 4 hours on top of probably a matter of days on the phone with Tech Support. So now I have finally thrown my S23. In the trash. I'll have to throw away my Galaxy. Watch, screen protector case, etc. In favor of an iPhone. My entire family are iphone users and have laughed at me for years for using an android. I'm never able to communicate in their family strings and videos that I've sent them appear fuzzy and grainy on their phones. I've asked Samsung to replace this with the newer model or heck, any model that doesn't lose valuable text, but they declined so Sayonara samsung... good riddance..
