I understand there might be a certain amount of recent messages stored locally for quick access, or a cache. But my phone has gotten up to around 30GB of messages stored locally, and my mac around 60GB (the vast majority of this storage being attachments, of course.) I have been using Messages in iCloud since it was released, and my iCloud storage is far from full. Why isn't it "offloading" more from local storage even as my devices get near-full? I wish there was a way to delete all attachments both locally and in the cloud - anything worth saving, I save to camera roll as I receive anyway. Has anyone else dealt with this same issue or come up with a workaround?
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Issue with messages in iCloud
- Thread starter harrisonjr98
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If you delete the message's thread and restart a new one, the data locally and in iCloud will be deleted on all devices.
If you enable in Settings > Messages > Message History on your devices, you won't have to delete the message threads manually, it'll do it automatically on a timely basis -- whatever you choose, 30 days or 1 year.
Or am I not understanding the question?
WARNING: both suggestions I suggested WILL delete messages sent and received: texts, images, videos, etc permanently.
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Yeah, I was hoping to keep texts themselves and delete only attachments, which are the thing that saps my space so quickly. It’s nice to have a searchable history of texts- I started saving them around 2016 and I would hate to go to a year deletion just to solve this issue.
On Mac go to About this Mac > Storage > Manage Storage > then go to the Messages section, and you can see all attachments, and you can delete them individually or select them all.
On iPhone, open a message thread, click the circle at the top with their name on it, then scroll down till you see “photos” and hit “see all”, there you can select multiple sent/received photos & videos and delete them.
As another warning (I’d hate for you to delete something you didn’t want too) do some small scale testing on the above suggestions first.
I should’ve put it in the OP but I know about these options. The Mac one via Manage Storage doesn’t actually delete all of the Library/Attachments folder in Finder for whatever reason, and I’m a bit scared to delete them straight from the Library folder for fear of effing something up.
The iPhone method is just too tedious for thousands of attachments received over the years.
I might try restoring my phone from iCloud backup and seeing if that clears any locally cached/redundantly stored stuff. Just hoping there was an easy way out 🥲
The iPhone method is just too tedious for thousands of attachments received over the years.
I might try restoring my phone from iCloud backup and seeing if that clears any locally cached/redundantly stored stuff. Just hoping there was an easy way out 🥲
Been putting it off because it’s a pain to redo all my 2FA code generators and other stuff tied locally to the iPhone (I have a lot of it.) Also was somewhat holding out on a prayer that someone would swoop in with a better idea lol.
What’s the deal when redoing 2FAs? I’ve never found that a hassle. What about it?
It’s just the number of accounts I use it for. It takes maybe an hour of manual work to go through them all and re-add whenever I set up an iPhone from scratch. Not bad, but not the hands-off iCloud restore it’d otherwise be to solve my problem with messages.
You're probably all over this, but 2F authenticators allow you to export all current accounts to an authenticator on another device. You can do this temporarily, wipe the first device and then export back to the first device. It takes seconds. Would that work for you?