If you have ever examined an iPhone and wondered what accounts for the missing messages in the free pages, this slide may bring you some ease. The settings are controlling what we can recover. If the user enables messages in iCloud sync, messages that are deleted will be purged from the free pages. This does not include iMessage, which should persist. How long do the messages persist? Well, as the most popular phrase in digital forensics is used here – it depends. On what, to be honest, I have no idea. I thought it would be purged immediately and it always has been from my testing, but the next slide will prove that theory to be incorrect. If the Messages is set to “off” in the iCloud settings, all deleted messages will remain in the free pages.

Something important to note here is that once the change is made, there is no going back. The default is for this setting to remain off. Once you turn the switch on, SMS messages will always be purged from the free pages even if you switch the toggle to off again.  Something else to consider is how long the messages are set to be kept! The default is forever but can be changed by the user. This user changed her device to save messages for one year.