iMessages!

[rayjay86]

I know this has been asked all over this forum and others but none of the steps i've use from those have worked so far, so I'm hoping someone has a surefire way to make this work.

I have a 16gb iPhone 5. It however had 2gb of documents/data and 1.9gb of iMessage when I looked in iTunes and through General --> Usage.

I tried various steps including turning off spotlight, deleting messages from computer and iphone, etc.

Finally i resorted to using iBackupbot to delete all the attachments (1.8gb) from the messages of a backup I'd made. Unfortunately the edited backup was "corrupt" when I tried to restore through iTunes and so I lost everything.

I restored from an iCloud backup from earlier that day, unfortunately there I still lost a lot of my in-app settings and logins, etc. When I restored from iCloud, I had the same MASSIVE iMessage usage and docs/data is back up to 2gb again!

Please help!! I went on holiday and after about 100 pics my iPhone told me I needed to free up space...

 

[JPNFRK7]

Have you deleted the messages in the messages app? If you go into a conversation and hold on a text bubble you will get a popup. Press "more", on the top left of the screen "delete all" will show up. This will delete all the messages including pictures, in that convo. Do this for all open conversations and then go delete that conversation by swiping left on it and hitting delete.

If you have texts you need to save make sure you get them before the process.

 

[cynics]

You want to make a backup in iTunes. Then using iBackupbot edit that backup file.

Click on multimedia file manager, then the other multimedia files tab at the top of the list.

It easier to sort by filename at this point. Then find ..../sms/attachments/... Delete those.

Then back to iTunes to return that backup file.

Is that how you did it?

.....

Google searching online resulted in another method but I don't know if it will work or not because I never tested it.


1. Backup your device in iTunes and then to iCloud
2. Go to Settings>iCloud and toggle Documents & Data to OFF
3. Then do a 2nd backup to iTunes and iCloud
4. Then restore the device from iCloud and the message attachments should be gone, turn Documents & Data back on again in the settings

.....

For those curious people do this because of a bug in iOS 6 that resulted in messages being deleted but not the attachments making them unavailable to access (messages are deleted and no longer accessible but the space is still being used). Since backups contain message data the backup needs to be modified or a restore needs to be done. It easy to spot because you can literally have no messages on the phone but usage data reporting you have a lot of storage used by messages.

 

[ron7624]

I've learned the hard way that 16gb isn't enough anymore. I've resorted to Box net to store my pictures, but it's too inconvenient to look at them.

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Have you deleted the messages in the messages app? If you go into a conversation and hold on a text bubble you will get a popup. Press "more", on the top left of the screen "delete all" will show up. This will delete all the messages including pictures, in that convo. Do this for all open conversations and then go delete that conversation by swiping left on it and hitting delete.

If you have texts you need to save make sure you get them before the process.

How do you save the text messages first? By doing the iTunes backup first?

 

[JPNFRK7]

I've learned the hard way that 16gb isn't enough anymore. I've resorted to Box net to store my pictures, but it's too inconvenient to look at them.

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How do you save the text messages first? By doing the iTunes backup first?

There are some programs for your computer that will do it. I dont know which ones though. I usually get the pics that I need then delete.

 

[rayjay86]

Have you deleted the messages in the messages app? If you go into a conversation and hold on a text bubble you will get a popup. Press "more", on the top left of the screen "delete all" will show up. This will delete all the messages including pictures, in that convo. Do this for all open conversations and then go delete that conversation by swiping left on it and hitting delete.

If you have texts you need to save make sure you get them before the process.

This definitely worked!

Also I've just gotten a 64gb iphone 6, so unlikely to have this problem for a while...