All my messages didn't transfer

I am transferring my iPhone X to a new iPhone Xs Max. My messages on the new phone stop about six weeks before today. All of the messages prior to that did transfer. The missing messages are still on my iPhone X and on my iMac. How do I get them back on my new phone?

Posted on Sep 23, 2018 7:02 AM

Reply
Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Posted on Mar 15, 2019 12:11 AM

Same thing happened to me. I set up new phone over iCloud and texts were a mess- several years in some conversations were missing, other conversations were missing entirely and those that did transfer were all out of order. I tried chatting with apple. They escalated it to a senior advisor who gave me a phone call. He walked me through a fix and admitted that there have been a lot of problems with iCloud lately in this context. I did a backup of my old iPhone X using iTunes (my texts were all still on that phone) on my computer. Then I plugged the new XSMax into my computer and did a restore from backup. After restoring, I disconnected the new phone from the computer. My old texts were not on the phone right away, but they started downloading from iCloud. It took a couple hours for everything to download (I had several GB of old texts), but everything downloaded completely and in the right order. I hope this helps- I was panicking at first, because a number of critical client texts had not transferred when I first tried to set up the new phone. I’m all good now.

27 replies
Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Mar 15, 2019 12:11 AM in response to Crumbbum

Same thing happened to me. I set up new phone over iCloud and texts were a mess- several years in some conversations were missing, other conversations were missing entirely and those that did transfer were all out of order. I tried chatting with apple. They escalated it to a senior advisor who gave me a phone call. He walked me through a fix and admitted that there have been a lot of problems with iCloud lately in this context. I did a backup of my old iPhone X using iTunes (my texts were all still on that phone) on my computer. Then I plugged the new XSMax into my computer and did a restore from backup. After restoring, I disconnected the new phone from the computer. My old texts were not on the phone right away, but they started downloading from iCloud. It took a couple hours for everything to download (I had several GB of old texts), but everything downloaded completely and in the right order. I hope this helps- I was panicking at first, because a number of critical client texts had not transferred when I first tried to set up the new phone. I’m all good now.

Sep 23, 2018 8:11 AM in response to Crumbbum

Go to the iMac. Make sure you are running the latest version of macOS. iMessage preferences>>Account>>click on enable messages on iCloud.


See if that helps. I found that I had to turn off iMessages in the cloud on the devices and then turn them on again. This would "force" message to resync. Also, did you check to see if you have enough space on iCloud?

Oct 4, 2018 1:15 PM in response to Crumbbum

Count me in. Weird thing is that all the messages are still up to date on my iPad Pro. And also weird: The dates on my new iPhone XS Max (in the message grouping list) has the latestest date listed (on the right), but when I go into some (not all) of the message groups, the last message date is from last year. And can’t seem to figure out why some are up to date and some are not. Very frustrating, especially since I know they exist in iCloud!

Dec 12, 2018 11:41 AM in response to Crumbbum

Same problem. Backed everything up to iCloud including messages from my 6s. Bought new XS, restored from backup, and some messages did not transfer over. Seems random. Messages with several friends are missing from a few months ago, but messages from last year appear to have transferred. We all seem to have gone through troubleshooting steps to no avail.


Is apple going to ignore this and hope we stop asking?!


Feb 7, 2019 5:26 PM in response to Crumbbum

Anyone figure out a solve for this? Just got a new XS with 12.1.3 and it isn't syncing any messages from the past year on it. However, they are on my macbook and seem to have downloaded to icloud. I have plenty of storage on icloud. Have toggled the message sync on my phone many times, signed in and out of apple id, restored the phone - nothing has worked so far.

This thread has been closed by the system or the community team. You may vote for any posts you find helpful, or search the Community for additional answers.

All my messages didn't transfer

Welcome to Apple Support Community
A forum where Apple customers help each other with their products. Get started with your Apple Account.