iMessage on iPhone vs. iMessages in iCloud

Question

Level 1

4 points

iMessage on iPhone vs. iMessages in iCloud

Upon restoring my iPhone once, my local iMessage never fully restored my full history from iCloud. To this day, I have 61.9 GB in iCloud (I've had my iPhone a long time), and only 5 GB on my iPhone.

The point of iCloud is that all of your messages sync across all devices, therefore- your messages should be the same everywhere. On my phone, I cannot see any messages more than 6 months old. I have tried everyone- restoring phone, programming it as a new phone, etc. Nothing has restored my historic texts. They are apparently still in the cloud, but what's the point if I can't see them.

I have also tried "Disable & Download" messages from the Cloud. When I do this, the storage on iPhone does jump up to 50 GB, but the text messages do not change so I don't understand what has actually been restored to the phone.

Can someone please help!

iPhone 14 Pro, iOS 17

Posted on Dec 18, 2023 2:38 PM

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Answer 1

Dec 18, 2023 3:10 PM in response to AlexAshley09

If you manually delete texts like I do then Messages might be stuck on the server end. I have been told by apple that when you manually delete texts they take up to 4 days to delete on the server end. Sometimes 180 days. Eventually they will delete itself on the server end. Might take up to two years though from ppl Ive talked to. Another technique is to go to settings>messages>keep messages for 30 days. You have 3 options under keep messages, Forever, 1 yr, 30 days. If you check 30 days then the older texts should delete too.

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Answer 2

muguy

Level 10

91,946 points

Dec 18, 2023 4:25 PM in response to AlexAshley09

If you use messages in iCloud, your messages are synced again Fromm those in the cloud. No messages are stored as part of your device backup.

If you do not use messages in iCloud then your messages are part of your device backup and ca be restored when restoring the device from the backup.

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Answer 3

Dec 18, 2023 4:59 PM in response to muguy

I never use messages in icloud and somehow my texts are still in my backup. But I manually delete them everyday so Im trying to figure out if theyre stuck on the server end not deleted there and causing the backup storage to increase instead of decrease. I only started having this issue in ios 17.2 Thats why Im wondering if its a bug in ios 17.2

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