iCloud and iMessage recovery

Choc0late wrote:

How can I recover a specific iMessage that I accidentally deleted? It has over four years of conversation.?

from your icloud or itunes backup, if you have one and you weren't syncing them to the cloud.

Is there a way to recover if they were syncing with iCloud? I’m told not, but have trouble believing that my iCloud wasn’t backed up on there end. It’s now been 48 hours.

I have backups of my computer from years previous and wonder if I could retrieve most of a conversation from one of those. In other words, do you know when they began backing up to iCloud by default?