Mixture
Thanks for your (slightly cynical) reply. I have absolutely no idea how the messages were deleted - indeed, they were all present & correct only a couple of hours earlier & I know for sure I haven't deleted them, accidental or otherwise. Also, I have no young kids around me at the moment either....
Yes, I do understand the importance of backups, the excuse I use for not doing a recent one is down to my rather erratic lifestyle at the moment, (due to circumstances beyond my control), so yes, I have learnt the hard way on this occasion.
autosync is set to automatic, I can't change this on my machine, (option greyed out), unless I plug in an apple device..
Anyway, I was unaware of the complete iphone backup via icloud, so have learnt something from your post.
If anyone else can offer some advice, I would be grateful.