Hi-
I've just bought and set up a new iPad Pro. Everything seems to be OK, emails, calendar, contacts, photo etc all showing up - except my Messages (texts). Only the two messages I've sent since setting up the ipad are showing. How to I sync / transfer my 100's of texts to my new ipad?
Thanks,
Andy
iMac, OS X Yosemite (10.10.4)
Hi Michael -
No - I set it up as a new device as I wanted to 'start with a clean slate' as it were.
As everything else transferred ok it just seemed odd that Messages don't! But if the only way to have them is to backup from the old ipad then I can do that.
(So, what would happen if this was my first ipad and I had no backup to recover from . . . .)
Thanks!
Andy
If this was your first Apple device, then you'd have no iMessage history to worry about moving over. If it was just your first iPad and you had an iPhone that you'd used for messaging, then you would restore from the iPhone backup to get that content onto the iPad.
The reason the other things (contacts, calendars, notes, reminders,...) came over with a new setup is because they in fact are not part of a backup but instead are synchronized across your iCloud account connected devices in real time using iCloud as the sync server. So when you set up as new, they just sync'd over to the new device from the iCloud cache'd copy. iMessages (and SMS/MMS texts from an iPhone) are not sync'd to iCloud at all and live in your device's storage, and get archived into your backup when you update it (and note that each iCloud or iTunes backup is incremental, so deleted messages are removed from the backup and only ones saved on the device are ever backed up).
The bottom line is neither iMessages, nor SMS/MMS texts on iPhones are sync'd anywhere and a device backup is the sole means of archiving and safe keeping them. Same goes for whatsapp and other 3rd party messaging services (unless they also offer their own online archiving, but I don't know of any that do, nor any carrier that archives texts either).
For the iPhone and other smart phones, there are apps to extract and archive SMS/MMS texts, if you need to keep an independent backup of those messages.
wellllll, FINALLY found why its not possibly to get imessages to the ipad...... ITS ONLY POSSIBLE IF THE DEVICE YOU ARE TRANSFERING TO CONTAINS THE SIM CARD THAT THE MESSAGES BELONG TO- and since my ipad pro dosent take a SIM card - ITS NOT possible to get old messages to my IPAD PRO :-(
Brian, are you saying if after an iCloud phone backup, I temporarily transfer the SIM card that's in my phone (where all messages are intact) to my iPad (where the messages are missing), that the restore from iCloud backup will then bring over my messages to the iPad?
Hi Michael, I tried your method but does not transfer my texts... and I have called support but they have been of no help.
Any idea as why texts do not transfer?
Regards
same here, made full back up from iphone to Itunes (pc), restored ipad from Itunes iphone backup, everything is perfect afterworth, but NO Imessages on ipad ? :-(
On Mac OS, copytrans works just fine for backing up the texts: http://www.copytrans.net/suppo...
Did you restore from a backup (iCloud or iTunes) of the old device? That's the only way to get your message history onto the new one.
Messages not transferred to new iPad
