how to recover imessage history

I finally did it. (Recovered my iChat history/iMessage history on my Mac from my old backup files)

What you need:

1. Your Time Machine back up of ~/Library/ or your old computer that you want to port the chat history from.

2. Your new Macbook Pro, cleanly installed.

What you do:

QUIT the MESSAGES APP

1. Go to ...path to your old home folder/Library (For me it is on a removeable disk so I had to do Finder-> Go -> Go to Folder-> type in "/Volumes/Old Macbook Pro/users/name/Library"

2. Open a separate Finder window, go to ~/Library (Hold down option and click on Go in Finder)

3. Locate the following folders in ~/Library (ON THE NEW MAC):

~/Library/Containers/com.apple.iChat

~/Library/Message

~/Library/Preferences

4. rename

~/Library/Containers/com.apple.iChat -> ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.iChat_old

~/Library/Message -> ~/Library/Message_old

5. Find all the files in ~/Library/Preferences that contains the string "iChat" or "iMessage" and cut them into a separate folder. Be sure to remember where you copied them from!

6. Copy /Volumes/Old Macbook Pro/users/name/Library/Containers/com.apple.iChat to your ~/Library folder

7. Copy /Volumes/Old Macbook Pro/users/name/Library/Message to your ~/Library folder

8. This step is trickey: Copy all the files that contains "iChat" or "iMessage" from /...path to backup/Library/Preferences/ into the corresponding directory in ~/Library/Prefrences

9. DO NOT START THE MESSAGES APP and restart your computer

10. Open Messages, your old chats should all be there.

My computer: rMBP 15" Late 2013

My OS: Mac OSX Mavericks