I am toying with the idea of installing Sierra on one of my Macs that is currently running El Cap. I've got many years' worth of messages in iMessage.
Is there a way to copy the messages from El Cap to Sierra?
If tou do not erase, then Messages & everything else should still be there if just updating the OS version.
Just be sure to have a good backup or two.
I went ahead today to see how to do this (and I installed High Sierra instead of Sierra but no matter).
When I did the clean install of High Sierra I didn't log in to iCloud because I wanted to copy messages over from El Capitan, which obviously doesn't store messages in iCloud.
But when I connected my user account to the drive that holds the main user folder that I have used on El Capitan for several years, the Mac automatically logged in to iCloud. This caused lots and lots of messages to show up in the High Sierra Messages.app.
The messages include the messages pulled from iCloud, but what I am wondering is if all old "non iCloud" messages that were on El Capitan are there or if they may have been over-written by what's in iCloud. Any thoughts on that?
Do you have a Time Machine backup you can chose I pick from?
Ok thank you. Is there a way to copy message over? I'd prefer to do a clean install.
Unfortunately not. I guess this means it's not possible, or?
I don't see a way, sorry. :(
That could work with assuring permissions on the copied folders & files.
Any luck yet?
Thank you very much for following up. Life has unfortunately conspired against my plan to do this until now but I hope to try it in the weekend.
OK. :)
No idea, too tough to tell without having access to both Macs. :(
What about copying the iChat or Messages folder over from El Cap?
Is it possible to move messages from an El Cap install to a Sierra install?
