Videos in iMessage: no de-dupe / references ? Can this be true?

[james948]

Here's a convo I had with chatgpt. Can this be true?

I can *sort* of understand the separate database for Photos and Messages (though it seems bananas to me) but to have the exact same video take up more space each time it's sent to someone seems too crazy to be true. Can anyone help?

 

[Reverend Benny]

Jaysus, I was dead sure that if I did sent the same video to 3 different people within imessage it would only keep 1 copy and reference from the other messages. Maybe Apple should get some storage people inhouse to work on optimizing storage
That is of course IF chatGPT is right 🙃

 

[james948]

This is just chatgpt but, I mean, wtf?

If they did that though people wouldn't need as much iCloud storage space. I'm already at the 2tb limit

 

[Reverend Benny]

This is just chatgpt but, I mean, wtf?

If they did that though people wouldn't need as much iCloud storage space. I'm already at the 2tb limit

I still struggle to understand why they would design it like this. One aspect could be that all chats are encrypted, that makes it harder to dedupe.

 

[james948]

I still struggle to understand why they would design it like this. One aspect could be that all chats are encrypted, that makes it harder to dedupe.

Good point.

But on-device though?
On an un-encrypted device I would have thought it would be possible? I can de-dupe my file system and then upload to Backblaze encrypted. But I expect I'm looking at this wrong. It seems like such a waste.