[iMore Question]

Someone I know has a big piece of messages gone from her one particular conversation. The conversation ends randomly on one day and resumes as randomly 2,5 weeks later. Also, when trying to retrieve older messages, a glitch occurs which throws you back to the latest messages from this person. Could those messages be simply deleted or is it a possible tech glitch?

[Rob Phillips]

Welcome to iMore! Try signing out of iMessage in Settings > Messages and then signing back in. While you're in Messages settings, go to down Keep Messages. How long is the device set to keep messages? Extend it out to a 1 Year or Forever. After that, give it some time (maybe a few hours) and see if the messages come back. If they don't, they probably don't exist on iCloud servers anymore.

As a last ditch effort you could try restoring from an old iCloud or iTunes backup (choose a date where all of the messages are likely to be there) and retrieving the messages. Nothing is guaranteed.