Due to the fact that every correspondence on the VKontakte social network can be purposefully or accidentally deleted, viewing it becomes impossible. Because of this, there is often a need to restore messages that were once sent. Throughout this article, we will talk about methods for viewing content from deleted conversations.
Instant Recovery
You can get back an erased VKontakte message very quickly. The easiest way is instant recovery. But it can only be used if you accidentally deleted a message and immediately decided to return it.
Immediately after you have selected one or more messages and clicked on the trash can icon, a deletion notification and a link will appear in place of the erased message and a link by clicking on which you can return the message back.
Please note that you can mark several tens, hundreds and even thousands of messages at once and erase them with one click, but you will have to restore them one at a time, since VK does not provide a mass recovery function.
There is a very important point - the recovery link will disappear as soon as you go to another page, or refresh or close the current one. At the same time, you can move to other conversations and dialogues - in this case, the link will remain in place.
This method has a couple more features:
- It does not work in VKontakte mobile applications. You can use quick message recovery only from the full and mobile versions of the site.
- If you deleted not several messages in a dialogue, but all correspondence with the user at once, then you will not be able to return it. The recovery link will not appear, which means it will be impossible to undo the deletion. There is a small plus in that when you delete all correspondence you receive a warning notice, so the likelihood of accidental deletion is minimal.
22.12.2018
14 679
All the secrets and hidden functions of VKontakte - you had no idea about such possibilities of the social network
Hello! I am very glad that you decided to read this article….
Let's start with a separate message
So, first let's talk about individual messages in dialogues. We may have several situations - let's look at them in order.
Deleted but still on this page
Let me quickly remind you how this is done.
You wrote several messages to the person. Then you selected one of them - with the mouse cursor, or by clicking on the screen if you are working from a mobile phone. After this, you will see a menu where you need to click on the “Delete” button. In the full version of the site, this corresponds to an icon in the form of a basket. And when working from a phone - the menu item of the same name. This can be seen in the picture below.
We delete a separate VKontakte message. On the left is the version from the computer, on the right is from the phone
After confirming the deletion, a “Message has been deleted” notification will appear in place of our message. And the “Restore” link.
Link to restore message
If you want to restore the message, click on this link. The text will be returned in its original form.
Note.
This function does not work from the phone. There will be no recovery link. In the case of the full version, the link will be available until you refresh or leave this page. This moment is shown in the video insert above. In the first option, the link is available. In the second, we refresh the page and it disappears.
Updated or left the page, the recovery link is not available
Now let's see what to do with a message that was deleted some time ago. We won't have a recovery link? Is it possible to watch it in this case? Yes you can.
Your interlocutor still has a copy of the correspondence. All you need to do is ask him to send you the desired text. Pay attention to the picture below. On the left is our version of the dialogue - one message has been deleted. And on the right is our interlocutor. All the text is there.
A copy of the message from the interlocutor
All you need to do is highlight the desired message, then click the “Forward” button in the menu. Find you in the list of users and send a message with a copy of the desired text attached.
When will a message fail to be returned?
If you have tried the delete function, you probably noticed that in the pop-up window where you are asked to confirm the operation, there is an option “Delete for everyone”. This is a new feature that allows you to completely delete a message in a conversation. If you check this box, the text will be deleted from your interlocutor as well. You can read more about this function in the article - deleting VKontakte messages.
"Delete for everyone" option
If you use this item, the message will be completely deleted and it will not be possible to restore it.
Please note that this function is only available for 24 hours after the text is published. It is not possible to completely remove earlier messages this way.
Help from a friend
In the event that you needed deleted messages after a while, or you refreshed the page and can no longer use instant recovery, you should ask your interlocutor for help. The fact is that the correspondence is saved for all participants in the dialogue or conversation, so even if you deleted all the messages, your friend will still have a copy of them.
Ask a friend to highlight and forward the messages you need. You cannot send the entire conversation at once, so your friend will have to manually select all messages and forward them to you.
This method, like the previous one, has a small caveat. Any user can delete a message sent by him within 24 hours from himself and from the person to whom he sent it. If you have erased a message for your interlocutor, then, accordingly, he will not be able to forward it to you.
#3 Addressing your interlocutor
As you know, two people participated in the conversation, which means that the messages were saved by your interlocutor. Ask him to forward the correspondence, and do not forget to explain the reason, so as not to ruin your relationship with your friend. For example, you could write something like:
Hello! I accidentally deleted our correspondence from yesterday and all the photos you sent.. If it’s not difficult for you, please forward those messages, I will be very grateful!
And we send to the interlocutor:
Please note that this method will only work in one case. If you have not deleted messages from your interlocutor as well.
Contacting technical support
If a friend also deleted messages or for some other reason did not send you the correspondence history, then you can ask technical support for help.
In the “Help” section there are entries on restoring dialogue, photographs and other materials from the page, in which the question of how to recover deleted messages is given an unequivocal answer - no way. However, the Internet is replete with articles about how technical support still helps with solving this problem. Let's try to figure it out.
According to information published by the VKontakte administration, the social network is included in the register of organizers of information dissemination on the Internet. This means that VK falls under clause 3 of Article 10.1 of the Federal Law “On Information, Information Technologies and Information Protection”. The law states that the organizer of the dissemination of information on the Internet (in our case, the social network VKontakte) is obliged to store the correspondence of Russian citizens for six months.
It turns out that the message will be stored on the social network server for 6 months, even if you delete it. From this we can conclude that you still need to contact technical support with a request to restore messages. Perhaps the social network does not have the functionality to return the correspondence back to the dialogue, but a support agent can send messages stored on the server, at least in a text file.
Uploading a personal archive
As I have already described in the table above, it is possible to download a personal data archive. It contains all your correspondence (mostly not deleted), posts, comments, videos, photographs, advertising targets, and so on. Sometimes, through the archive it is possible to try to recover deleted correspondence.
The only problem is that this option does not guarantee one hundred percent probability. Considering the fact that its formation can take several days, you shouldn’t count on it, but it’s worth a try.
To do this, we need to go to the official page of the site, where it is described in detail about what it is and how to submit a request for unloading.
Click on the marked link in the post and you will be redirected to another page, which will describe what information the site collects. We read and scroll to the very bottom, where we will find the desired button for the request.
After this, you will be asked to select what data you want to upload. If you select the “comments” option, the preparation time will increase to several days.
After selecting and confirming, you will receive a message from the administration stating that you have made a request to create an archive. When it is ready, a notification and a download link will be sent to the same dialog.
Everything is done quite conveniently in the form of the site, so you can easily check whether any messages have been restored after deletion.
Notifications by mail and SMS
Users who are concerned about the security of their VKontakte profile often enable various notifications such as account login alerts, email and phone notifications about new messages and other events on the social network.
If you are one of these prudent users, you can go to your email and look for the letter you need, or delve into the history of SMS notifications from VK on your phone. Most likely, there will be a lot of correspondence. Even your approximate memories of the contents of the message or the date it was sent will greatly speed up the search for the desired letter.
You can use the content search - enter at least one word from the message you are looking for, and the mail service or smartphone will find the required letter.
Unfortunately, this method also has flaws. Alerts only come about incoming messages. If you are looking for a message that was sent by you, you will not find it either in the mail or in SMS.
Setting up a VKontakte page to restore messages in the future
There are some recommendations in order to restore your correspondence or message in the future if they are deleted. In your VK profile settings, you can enable notifications to your email address. In this case, every time someone writes a message to you on VKontakte, notifications will be sent to your email. In these notifications, you can find the message you need if you delete it on your social network page. To enable this notification:
- Open your VK page.
- Select the arrow on the right in the top panel next to your avatar and click “Settings” in the drop-down menu.
- A list of settings will appear in the next window, your data is located a little lower, and opposite each block with certain data there is a button for editing it. If you have not yet linked an e-mail to your VK account, then now is the time to do so.
- Select the “Email” block and click opposite “Edit”.
- Next, you will need to enter your address, go to your mailbox and activate your mail.
- Then select “Notification” in the block on the right.
- Scroll to the bottom of the page and find the "Email Alert" section.
- In this section, you should check all the items for which you want to receive notifications by email.
- Near the block you can also find the line “Alert frequency”. Here, select from several “Always notify” options.
Now all messages will appear in your mail. Even if you delete posts on the VK page, you can find your e-mail address. You can also change your mail address in this section by specifying a second mailbox or several mailboxes. But you can only assign one for notifications.
Cache check
Each browser caches some files from the sites the user visits. This process of saving data to a computer allows you not to download information from a web server each time, but to use existing files. This significantly reduces site loading time.
You can use this feature of the site to find messages that are not very old. This operation can only be performed if automatic cache clearing is not enabled in your browser settings, and you have not deleted it yourself recently.
The process of searching and viewing the cache in different browsers has significant differences, so this is the topic of a separate article. Now we will briefly analyze the process of reading cached pages using the example of the popular Google Chrome browser.
First of all, you need to turn off the Internet. This will prevent the browser from overwriting the cache. After that, go to the page with experimental settings (chrome://flags/#show-saved-copy) and in the “Show Saved Copy Button” item, set the switch value to “Enable: Primary”. This option adds the ability to view cached pages when there is no Internet connection.
Still not turning on the Internet, go to the page with a list of VKontakte dialogues. Since your Internet is turned off, you need to copy the link in advance. You can also use this URL - https://vk.com/im?peers.
On the familiar page with the dinosaur and the notification about the lack of Internet, you will see the “Open saved copy” button. Click on it and you will be taken to the dialog page, which is stored in the browser cache. The absence of a button on the page means that it was not cached and there is no saved copy on your computer. In this case, try using any other method given in the article.
How does deleting messages on VK work?
When communicating with friends on the VK social network, by default all messages are saved.
You can find them quite simply:
- To do this, you just need to click on the left in the main menu “Messages”.
- Then select the desired person with whom you have already corresponded.
- If you haven't deleted anything, all messages will appear in front of you. They can be viewed by normal mouse scrolling (scrolling).
You can delete all correspondence on VKontakte at once:
- To do this, click on the left side of the page in the “Messages” menu.
- Hover your mouse over the conversation area.
- A cross will appear, with which you can delete the entire dialog at once.
By clicking on the cross you can delete the entire dialogue - When you press it, the system will warn you that all messages contained in this correspondence will be irretrievably lost.
- If you continue, you will no longer be able to recover any messages with this person. Click “Ok” and the correspondence will be deleted.
It is strongly recommended not to delete all correspondence with a person completely! This step must be taken thoughtfully if the messages are truly no longer needed. In correspondence, you can delete messages one at a time. In this case, you will still have the opportunity to restore it before updating the page. This means that if you deleted information from the correspondence and went to another site, it will be lost and cannot be further restored. Until you refresh the page on VK and switch to another one, in the block above you will be able to see the notification “Message deleted. Restore". By clicking the “Restore” link, the message will again become available and return to its place in the correspondence.
This is interesting: Virtual number for VK.
Archive with VKontakte profile data
As I mentioned above, the VKontakte social network, like other social networks operating in Russia, collects information about its users and stores it for 6 to 12 months from the date of receipt. The current legislation of the Russian Federation obliges them to do this. This means that the incoming and outgoing message will be stored on the VK server for another six months from the moment it was sent, even if the recipient and sender deleted this message.
In November 2021, against the backdrop of some dissatisfaction among users that they cannot find out what information about them is stored on the social network server and transferred to third parties, VKontakte has the opportunity to obtain all your profile data that is on the social network.
You can read detailed information about the information collected and download an archive with all your data (including messages) on a special VKontakte page. Scroll through the text about how to manage data - under it you will find the “Request an archive” button. Click on it to submit a request for the necessary materials.
A window will open in front of you in which you need to check the data that interests you. If you only need messages, then uncheck the remaining boxes and click the “Send request” button. VKontakte is concerned that information about you does not fall into the hands of intruders, so the action will need to be confirmed by entering the password for your account.
Despite the fact that the window for sending a request indicates a waiting time of about 10 minutes, the link to the archive with the data usually arrives within several hours. You will receive a notification and a personal message from the social network administration when the download link is generated. For security reasons, the download time for the information file is limited - after a few days the link will become inactive.
After downloading, unzip the archive. All folders and files have English names, but to understand what and where to look, basic knowledge of the language or skills in working with an online translator is enough.
You can view a list of all your dialogues and conversations in the “messages” directory. The names of the folders correspond to the ID of the person whose correspondence is stored inside. At the bottom of the list are directories whose names begin with the numbers “200000” or others that clearly do not correspond to the VK user ID.
This refers to conversations you have ever participated in. To read messages, open the folder with the desired ID and run the file located inside.
Browser extension
A browser extension such as VKopt can help with message processing. You can download it on the official website at the link: //vkopt.net/download/. Select your browser and download the appropriate version of the extension.
We recommend: How to go to the beginning of a dialogue in VK from a computer
IMPORTANT. Any extensions exist and develop independently of the official VKontakte administration. This means that the stability of their operation cannot be guaranteed. For the same reason, there are a large number of clones of popular extensions; be careful when choosing a download source.
After installing the extension, do this:
- Open the message.
- Select the “Statistics” item in “Actions”.
- We set the parameters that interest you and click “Let's go!”
- We choose a person to talk to, enter the time and date.
- We see what we are looking for. Yes, even if the entire dialogue was deleted.
Creating a backup using VkOpt
To avoid a similar problem in the future associated with accidental deletion of VKontakte correspondence, try using the VkOpt browser extension. Among its many features is a tool for creating a backup copy of messages on your computer.
After installing the add-on, new options will appear in the dialog control menu. Go to the conversation or conversation you want to back up. Hover your cursor over the three dots and select “Save Conversation” from the pop-up menu.
There are two formats to choose from for saving messages: text format (*.txt) and web page format (*.html). I recommend saving in html - this format is more convenient to read, and you can open images and listen to music from the saved dialogue.
VkOpt will take some time to prepare the array for downloading. After a few seconds, you will be asked to choose a file name and a location to store it on your computer. After saving, you can open and re-read the document with your correspondence at any time.
The disadvantages of creating a backup using VkOpt are that you cannot create a backup copy of all dialogues and conversations at once - you have to save each correspondence separately. You will also have to regularly update the downloaded file to add new messages that appeared since the last backup.
Other ways to restore correspondence
VkOpt extension
Until recently, to restore deleted conversations, VK users used the VkOpt extension, which is supported by many browsers.
Users went to their VKontakte page and in the “Messages” section clicked on the “Settings” button. They then selected the option “Search for deleted messages” and “Try to recover messages.” The system started the procedure.
Now VkOpt only offers data backup - saving dialogues. To enable it, open the extension menu and click “Save correspondence”, selecting the desired format. The information will be saved on the computer's hard drive.
Recovering deleted data from browser cache
If the above methods did not help, you can try another one - try to restore correspondence from the browser cache. You can access the cache contents using the free ChromeCacheView application from NirSoft. It works with many popular browsers, despite the name.
Procedure:
- Launch the program, press F9 or go to the "File" menu and select "Select Cache Folder".
- In the address bar, enter the path to the cache folder or click the button with the name of your browser.
- A list with cache elements will appear in the window that opens. Find and select the desired object.
- Press F6 or select "Open Link in Web Browser" from the File menu.
Restoring data from the cache is also available only to PC users. Unfortunately, this method does not work on mobile devices.
Other ways to return deleted correspondence on VKontakte
There is another way to try to read previously deleted messages on VK. To do this, we need to contact the person with whom the correspondence was conducted and ask him to forward the required message. He can send the text both within a social network and through an email address or other similar services. If this method is unacceptable, then you can contact the VKontakte support service. Although administrators claim that there is no way to restore messages, you can explain your situation and ask for help in returning the necessary text.
Representatives of the social network in support write that deleted correspondence cannot be restored. But here in the quick answers you can find information that talks about deleting your old pages from the database. That this cannot be done immediately or very quickly. This means that any information from your page on the social network server is still stored for some time. So it's worth a try.
To write a message to VK technical support:
- Select your avatar in the top block and click “Help”.
- Select one of the ready-made answers and at the bottom “I still have questions.”
Click on the item “I still have questions” - It will take you to a page with a form to fill out.
- In the first field you need to enter the title of the post and the topic of your appeal.
- Below in the large field, describe the details and be sure to give arguments why they should help you.
We recommend reading: How to go to the beginning of a conversation in VK.
How to recover individual messages?
If you suddenly deleted one or more messages, you can immediately restore it right in the chat window. To do this, you will need to click on the “Restore” button.
The message will work in standard mode after such a restoration.
Just a moment, I hope it will be useful for you to find out how to find your double by photo or who visited the VKontakte page.
