Everyone loves to text, and these days it is easier than ever with smartphones that are touch screen, have auto correct (which, frankly, can be annoying at times), and even some third-party apps that allow you to text for free. As with anything, popularity and frequent use comes with a price - problems.

How many times have you deleted a text message that is full of information that you need back? Do you think that text message is gone forever? In some cases, that may hold true, but there is a good chance that you can get some or all of the information back.

Take an Apple iPhone, for example. Much like a computer, when information is deleted it is not truly erased. When you delete a text message from an iPhone, it is actually still there. However, it is now being held in the unallocated portion of the physical memory. The bad news is that anything that is in the unallocated portion of the memory is subject to being overwritten. Thus, consider the biggest factors that affect the iPhone messsage recovery are available free memory and usage.

For example, if you have a 16GB iPhone and it has 15.8GB of music, photos, text messages, and apps on it, chances are unallocated memory is going to be overwritten quickly. Along the same lines, if the iPhone user is texting constantly (like my teenager who sends and receives in excess of five thousand text messages per month), the risk of the deleted text messages being overwritten increases. Another thing to keep in mind is that there is no rhyme or reason as to the way an iPhone writes data to the physical memory. It doesn't care if the data is old or new, it just writes it to whatever portion of the unallocated memory is easiest to write to at the time. Thus, when recovering deleted information, you may get back all of the message, but you may also get back only part of it.