iPhone 13 Pro Why do Messages take up so much local space when iCloud is supposed to be storing them?

[harrisonjr98]

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?

 

[jav6454]

I believe messages are stored locally always.

 

[harrisonjr98]

Definitely not all of them - when setting up a phone from scratch it only seems to download about 10GB or so of them from iCloud, but then it just builds over time.