iCloud Help! Messages take up too much space! Store in iCloud ONLY?

[GooseInTheCaboose]

So I got a new MacBook and I noticed my messages are taking up a whopping 20GB. I have no need for these to be stored DIRECTLY ON my device SSD.

I would be content with these messages in the Cloud. However, I want to be able to access them with my device...via iCloud. Just not store them on my MacBook.

Is this possible? How do I change the settings to do this?

 

[Queerwavves]

So I got a new MacBook and I noticed my messages are taking up a whopping 20GB. I have no need for these to be stored DIRECTLY ON my device SSD.

I would be content with these messages in the Cloud. However, I want to be able to access them with my device...via iCloud. Just not store them on my MacBook.

Is this possible? How do I change the settings to do this?

Any luck here? I’m encountering the same issue

 

[TonyC28]

I’ve struggled with this. I don’t think there’s a way for the user to decide. If you turn iCloud messages on, it will store some amount on the device and you don’t choose how.

 

[obesechess]

Has anyone found a fix for this yet? I have messages set to delete automatically after six months and automatically store all media in icloud, however for some reason Messages is taking up Seventy Gigabytes on my M2 Mac Mini's SSD, compared to 1.4GB on my iPhone 16 Pro Max.

I've already tried de-syncing, deleting, and re-syncing with iCloud as advised by Apple Support, and that didn't help. I wouldn't even mind them being stored on my 2TB External Drive, but that's more than a quarter of my 256gb of SSD space.

 

[splifingate]

My Local Messages storage (on the Studio) is ~188GB 🤷‍♂️

[I really need to do some date-housekeeping on the matter; weed-out the unnecessary cruft that follows me around]

I'm assuming that the d/l

functionality to which we are familiar--when we enable iCloud Drive--is not really a Prime consideration for AAPL with Messages.

My Photos Storage is ~339GB . . . I imagine that others hold much more.

I enable 'Optimize Storage' in Photos, because I really don't need 1:1 all the time (I am sufficiently-connected, and there is very little lag-time Cloud -> Device).

Personally, I hold no shortage in storage . . . a mirroring of 1TB wouldn't really tax my systems....

But, I hear your concern.

File a 'bug' with AAPL ?

 

[obesechess]

Hey folks,

I finally got an answer from Apple Support on this. It was like, the fifth person I'd spoken to over the last few months. If anyone else has figured this out, I apologize, but I wanted to share it here.

The "messages" app saves a cached version of all attachments, sent and received, to your hard drive. This is independent of any photos or files you've saved to their respective folders - ie, if someone sends me a 1GB video of my band playing, and I save it to my photos, there is still a cached version of that 1GB video on my hard drive.

So, what I've done is go to Settings -> Storage -> Messages -> the little i with a circle around it -> and then deleted those files. I make sure that I've saved the ones I actually want to keep, but a lot of them are just kind of silly nonsense I've saved over the past few years.

As far as I can tell, this ONLY deletes the cached version on your hard drive, the attachment will still be there in the chat if it is one you received, but you should double-check that you've saved things to photos/files/wherever first in case I am wrong. I'm going through this very slow process - oddly enough, the amount of storage Messages is taking up according to the "Storage" app is fluctuating as I do this, but I think that's the fix.

Cheers.

 

[obesechess]

Extra follow-up after a few more calls with Apple. There's a MUCH easier way to do this.

Navigate to Users > [your user] > Library (you may have to enable seeing hidden folders with CMD + Shift + "period") > Messages > Attachments -- Delete everything in the folder and empty recycling.

This freed up 73GB of space in two minutes by deleting TWO HUNDRED AND SEVENTY SIX THOUSAND FOLDERS, each of which was a nested cluster of 15 folders containing a single image, audio recording, or video file each.

The only issue I've run into is that I now need to re-download any attachments I've received when I use iMessage on my Mac, but since they're all stored in iCloud anyway they show right back up when I click the download button.

There is also a script to automatically delete this folders at certain intervals that a user on Reddit has written, but I have not personally used it.

https://www.reddit.com/r/MacOS/comments/1lr1jaf/script_to_automatically_clean_imessage