Message histories not appearing on new iPad

[boston04and07]

Hi everyone,

I just got a new iPad mini after selling my old one a few weeks ago. I still have an iCloud backup from my old iPad, but thought I'd set it up by restoring from a backup I made from my iPhone 6S this afternoon, so that my message histories would be in sync (without the two-week gap I had between iPads). I've tried restoring from both an iCloud backup and an iTunes backup of my iPhone 6S, both made today, but with each method everything but iMessage histories transfers over. My Messages app is just blank on my new iPad. Has anyone encountered this? Any ideas would be greatly appreciated! It's super important to me that my message histories transfer over, so I'd be willing to try anything.

Thanks for any help with this, and happy holidays!

 

[Mlrollin91]

From what I have been reading around here, I believe there is a bug with iOS 9.1/9.2 with iPhone 6s, Backups and Messages. I thought it was strictly related to iCloud, but maybe its iTunes as well.

On a side note, I didn't know you could load an iPhone backup on an iPad. I thought it was iPad to iPad and iPhone to iPhone only. Could be the root cause of the issue as well.

 

[boston04and07]

Yeah, it was odd - pretty much everything came over to the iPad *but* messages. I realized then that everything else I have on my devices, except for messages, is somehow stored in the cloud, so I decided to take the opportunity to just do a clean install while restoring only my message histories. I followed these instructions and it worked perfectly. I ended up with a fresh install of iOS 9.2 but with all my message histories intact. This was even better than what I had before, since on my old iPad, my messages just went as far back as when the messages app was introduced on the iPad. Now they go as fas back as my first iPhone circa 2008.

Now if only Apple would give us the option of storing our messages in the cloud, I'd be much happier. But until that happens, this worked for me.

 

[Mlrollin91]

Thanks for the link above. I am going to use that method to save health data and achievements so I can restore my iPhone as new and only save that information.

 

[boston04and07]

Thanks for the link above. I am going to use that method to save health data and achievements so I can restore my iPhone as new and only save that information.

No problem! I haven't tried restoring that kind of data myself, but I can verify that the linked method did indeed work for restoring messages flawlessly. If you know where to look for the data you wish to restore, I would imagine it would work for that as well.

This surprised me - I had no idea you could do this with in-jailbroken iOS backups. It's definitely good to know, though.