Full iMessage history on one iOS Device but not the other?

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Level 1

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Full iMessage history on one iOS Device but not the other?

So I was on my iPhone the other day and by complete accident I activated and tapped the 'Delete All' messages on my conversation thread with my girlfriend. The problem is we are applying for a partnership visa and the message history is submissable to immigration as part of the proof of our relationship.

I tried to restore my backup from iTunes, but for some reason the backup from 2 weeks ago appears corrupted as everytime I try to restore I get the message "your iphone disconnected" about 2 minutes after the restore starts. There is a more recent backup but that was captured automatically when I plugged in my phone and that backup is *AFTER* the message history was deleted.

My iPad backup was intact so I restored that and I have the conversation history there. I have it syncing the messages to icloud and according to what I see in iCloud it has pushed that full history into my iCloud account as the total storage reported is around 1.2GB and this particular history is 720mb so it surely seems to be up in iCloud. When I look at my iPhone it shows the same total size, but that chat thread is missing from the 'Top Conversations' listing.

How do I get my iPhone or even my Mac to download the full history which appears to be intact in iCloud? Or is there some other way to transfer the history that is on the iPad over to the iPhone so I have it in both places?

iPhone XS

Posted on Jun 7, 2020 1:25 PM

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Answer 1

zinacef

Level 10

89,102 points

Jun 7, 2020 3:21 PM in response to Audiophilia

Are you enabling iMessage in iCloud on the iPhone and Mac?

Keep all your messages in iCloud - Apple Support

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Answer 2

zinacef

Level 10

89,102 points

Jun 7, 2020 7:20 PM in response to Audiophilia

Your latest post above confuses me because if you said you were using iMessage in iCloud and deleted the messages, then those messages cannot be retrieved via backup because they were in iCloud. See this to understand it better - What does iCloud back up? - Apple Support. Now if you weren't using iMessage in iCloud and deleted the messages, you could very well restore from a backup and the messages would be recovered.

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Answer 3

Audiophilia Author

Level 1

15 points

Jun 7, 2020 3:26 PM in response to zinacef

Yup. It only downloads the messages sent since the date I accidentally deleted the conversation thread. Yet even on those devices I can see the iMessages taking up >1gb worth of storage. So all the devices agree on how much is stored in iCloud, but they aren't downloading the full history

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Answer 4

Audiophilia Author

Level 1

15 points

Jun 7, 2020 5:44 PM in response to zinacef

All my iDevices were using iMessages in iCloud when I accidentally deleted all the message (I thought I was deleting just one message that was glitched and didn't send, but it was all messages). The entire conversation thread disappeared from everything.

I then restored my iPad from a backup that was taken the week before I did that and the iPad now shows the deleted conversation history in it's entirety. That message thread goes back about 13 months and has quite a few photos inside it so it reports as 720mb on the iPad when looking at iCloud>Manage Storage>iMessages>Top Conversations. The entire iMessages backup in iCloud is about 1.2gb

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Answer 5

zinacef

Level 10

89,102 points

Jun 7, 2020 3:32 PM in response to Audiophilia

Answer the following:

Are you seeing the deleted messages on other devices?
Were you using iMessage in iCloud when you deleted the messages?

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Answer 6

Audiophilia Author

Level 1

15 points

Jun 7, 2020 7:48 PM in response to zinacef

iMessages are in iCloud. I do not do iCloud backup. The backups are all done to my Windows 10 pc using iTunes. So I restored from iTunes to the iPad and got the messages back on the iPad. The iTunes restore from my backup from 2 weeks ago always fails and only my most recent iTunes restore for my Iphone XS will restore and that is *after* the iMessage conversation was lost.

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Full iMessage history on one iOS Device but not the other?

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