iChat conversation history missing

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iChat conversation history missing

HI，
I havn't use iChat in couple of months. When I today, after chatting with a contact, going to iChat folder to check up some important messeges, then found my saved conversations are all gone! except today's transcripts. I don't even know when they were lost. Check through all my harddrive, nothing found. Sadly, it happened on my MSN conversation history as well!

Why that folder is empty? Any possible that I get it back? Anyone has any idea would be appreciated.

Thanks!
Wen

powerbook G4, Mac OS X (10.4.11)

Posted on Aug 19, 2010 10:23 PM

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Answer 1

Aug 20, 2010 1:32 PM in response to same_o

Hi,

Welcome to the  Discussions

Saved Transcripts in Any iChat version have always been stored in your Home Folder/Document/iChats

iChat 2 and 3 put them in there "loose" as it were and therefore you could find all of one Buddies chats together.

At iChat 4 Apple decided to Files the chats in sub-folders by date.

My Hard drive has been updated from Panther (iChat 2) through to iChat 4.0.9 on my G4 tower and I have Loose Chats and Date folders (plus some I organised to to Particular people's chats) going back to 2004

I have never known iChat to lose any Chats.

I will say that in the iChat Menu > Preferences > Messages you can change the folder (Although I never used this as it was not very good in iChat 2) and you could in fact send the Chats to be stored anywhere.

OS 10.4.11 is before Time Machine was added to the OS so this method of Potential Back-ups is not available to you.

Are you in the habit of backing up your Home Folder ?

I take you are in the same User Account you previously were using in your Mac ?

I presume you were using Spotlight to find the files ?
I used ".ichat" as a search and got "over 10,000" as a Result (I have multiple drives and partitions running Tiger, Panther and Leopard so found some duplicates).

If you have lost them and unless you have a Backup there is no way of getting them back.

9:32 PM Friday; August 20, 2010

Please, if posting Logs, do not post any Log info after the line "Binary Images for iChat"

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