Archive of conversation in Messages

Hi,

If you were Saving on Close then you may have been storing the Conversation on a session/day by day basis whilst dismissing it from view in earlier version of Messages.

It seems that the x that appeared when mousing over a chat in the Side bar on a Mac version allowed you to dismiss from view the Chat whilst storing it as a Saved Chat.

Saved Chat also get summarised in the chat.db data bases in ~/Library/Messages and enables better recall of the "history" of some chats.

The reason I say "Seems" is since Sierra it appears that the x deletes the chat removing it from the Saved Chats file but like you I have experienced partial "recoveries" of past conversations without being able to pin down which bits still work and which bits don't.

I tend to delete on my iPhone and iPad as I used to know that it was Stored on my Mac.

This does not seem to be an option now and I have things showing on the Mac version's Side Bar that previously I would have dismissed.

As I came from iChat and AIM chats I don't have that many spare iMessages conversations to try and experiment with.

Therefore a Search may show items that are in the Archive Folder for Saved Chats but searching back up a conversation will be pulled from the summaries of the items that are in the chat.db items

The archive folder is in ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.iChat/Data/Library/Messages/Archive

On some people's systems this last item may be an Alias point to an Archive Folder in ~/Library/Messages (along with the Attachments folder)

9:07 pm Monday; December 11, 2017

Hi,

My experience is that once Messages has "decided" that it is not looking or holding summaries of older chats then little can be done to "recover" them.

I say that based on this in Sierra:-

These three Incompatible items appeared as shown at an Update I did in June 2014

I found nothing at the time to sort this but later came across this

OS X Yosemite Messages database merger · GitHub

it is worth reading all the comments underneath as well as they point out important bits to make it run properly.

The most important bit is getting the correct Darwin versions (See around the 11th May)

I have not used this (I keep telling myself "yet") but now also happens again in High Sierra which mean I have two lots of incompatible files showing in that version.

As a result I have the same things happening when I find an older chat that is not summarised properly only opening in a separate window.

As in High Sierra it will only be iMessages and Jabber conversations I am not sure it warrants the effort just to see all my AIM conversation back to 2004

for the Points.

8:09 pm Tuesday; January 2, 2018