My iPhone XS and MacBook Pro have been syncing Messages in Cloud for months and were syncing fine through last night when I first turned on my new iPhone 11 Pro. I have Messages sync turned on in my iCloud settings on the iPhone 11 Pro but, now 12 hours since setting up the device, the Messages app is still empty. Not a single message is there. All other iCloud data is there (calendars, contacts, favorites, passwords, everything from the backup I told it to restore to the iPhone 11 Pro). Anyone else unable to get Messages to sync to new iPhone? What am I missing?
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iPhone 11 Pro Messages in Cloud not syncing to new iPhone 11 Pro
- Thread starter talkin73
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I agree. You have hundreds of thousands of people setting up new phones this weekend. I am sure Apple's servers are getting hammered.
Exactly. While I am taking this year off for launch day upgrades, this happens every year. By the next day, all is well again. Just takes time. I know it's frustrating, believe me, but it will right itself.
you do have to have it plugged in and connected to wifi in order to sync. A pop up notice usually shows up on the bottom of the screen with those two requirements but i noticed on my iphone 11, the notice didn’t show up when i first set it up. but yes like the others have also said, it takes a while for that process to finish also
My messages came through fine from an iCloud backup, but photos from iMessages haven’t come through yet. They’re in the message thread, but not showing up in the “info” section yet.
Problem persisted, even with time, until I went into iCloud settings and toggled the Messages button off and then back on. Immediately Messages app then displayed the "Downloading messages from cloud..." at the bottom of the screen and was done in five minutes. After posting, I recalled having the same issue when this feature was first enabled through an incremental iOS upgrade and even with the button turned on like all buttons in iCloud settings (and the the fact that all the other data was syncing) it would not sync until the radio button was toggled off and then on again.
Above might be a quick fix for those that find it seems to be taking hours or days. I don't believe that time is actually the issue given all my other iCloud data was synced within 20 minutes of logging into my iCloud account on the device for the first time, including 88MB of Calendar data and 200GB for Photos. By comparison, Messages is 28.6MB, much smaller than both.
Above might be a quick fix for those that find it seems to be taking hours or days. I don't believe that time is actually the issue given all my other iCloud data was synced within 20 minutes of logging into my iCloud account on the device for the first time, including 88MB of Calendar data and 200GB for Photos. By comparison, Messages is 28.6MB, much smaller than both.
When you toggled, did you get the “not all messages have completed downloading to phone” message? I am getting that now which gives me some hope that this is still in progress, but if it’s not there soon I may try your method. Let me know!
No I did not get any message. It was as if nothing were happening and the toggling off and on began the process for the first time.
interesting, thank you. I’ll take a look tonight or tomorrow morning and see if I can get it done
That method didn’t work so I am at a bit of a loss. My current plan is to go through my iMessages and save photos that I want. Tough in a few threads that go back to like 2014 lol but I’ll try to make it happen.
Another option I've used previously to restart syncing when something is off is to log out of iCloud entirely on all devices syncing with that account and then log back in. Sounds like a pain but generally doesn't take that long and it has fixed sync problems with contacts, calendars and other things for me in the past. Don't know if you've tried, but if not, consider logging out of the account in question on all devices, then log back into them and perhaps that will help. Messages are the newest to sync and really seem most flaky and error prone to me.
Bumping this thread. I just switched to an 11 and for an entire week the "downloading messages from icloud" kept popping up but it never would sync up. I'm on iOS 13.6. Today I reset everything and restored it from a previous backup. I've toggled icloud messages on and off, signed out and back in of imessage on the phone.
What is an appropriate time to wait for icloud messages to finally show up?
What is an appropriate time to wait for icloud messages to finally show up?
I would like to also jump into this as well. Using an iPhone 11 Pro Max on the latest iOS version and having the stuck on Downloading messages from icloud progress bar. It's been more than 3 days now. I've contacted apple and I've gone from an apple rep to a senior advisor to now an iCloud engineer. I'm still waiting to hear back soon.
I can't even delete the messages in the iCloud settings anymore, whenever I try to it shows "unable to update iCloud settings at this time" message. I don't know what's going on.
They should start showing up right away although, it could take a little while for the process to complete, depending on how many messages you have to sync.
Yeah I’ve tried everything twice and it didn’t help. I’ll just keep my fingers crossed we’ll get a .1 update sooner then later.