No iMessage in iCloud option?!

[mavis]

So I'm setting up my M1 MacBook Pro and I noticed that iMessages is taking up 40GB of disk space. Odd, I thought, since I have iMessage in iCloud enabled (2TB iCloud plan) ... All of my messages are synced, but it's wasting a lot of disk space on my MacBook. According to Apple, there should be an option to store messages in iCloud, but that option does not appear on my Mac. When I go to About this Mac/Storage/Manage/Store in Cloud, I only see two options (Desktop and Documents, and Photos) rather than three (the third is iMessages) which Apple's support pages say, both online and in Big Sur's help window. Screenshot attached.

Does anyone actually have this working? Any suggestions on how I can free up that 40GB of iMessage disk space?

 

[hg.wells]

It’s based on time and available storage space, it will do an initial sync of everything as it’s a new machine. It will then offload items over time as they are not used / the system needs more space.

if you want to clear up that space, open the “About This Mac” menu and click on storage, you should then see the option to manage, you can click on messages and delete the files that are taking up the space.

This will delete the file completely though, so make sure you want to delete it, by selecting it and clicking the space bar to preview the item first.

 

[chrfr]

So I'm setting up my M1 MacBook Pro and I noticed that iMessages is taking up 40GB of disk space. Odd, I thought, since I have iMessage in iCloud enabled (2TB iCloud plan) ... All of my messages are synced, but it's wasting a lot of disk space on my MacBook. According to Apple, there should be an option to store messages in iCloud, but that option does not appear on my Mac. When I go to About this Mac/Storage/Manage/Store in Cloud, I only see two options (Desktop and Documents, and Photos) rather than three (the third is iMessages) which Apple's support pages say, both online and in Big Sur's help window. Screenshot attached.

The setting for enabling Messages in iCloud is only in the Messages app preferences in Big Sur.

 

[mavis]

The setting for enabling Messages in iCloud is only in the Messages app preferences in Big Sur.

Right, and I have that enabled, but DaisyDisk is saying that I have 41GB of iMessage data on-disk, and the system storage manager is reporting 13GB - still excessive, when I haven't actually opened or downloaded any of my old iMessage attachments ...

 

[mj_]

Maybe they removed this option on Big Sur? I can confirm that Store in iCloud is not available for messages on neither my Intel iMac nor my M1 Air.

 

[hg.wells]

How much free storage space do you have?

As mentioned its time / space based, if your system has free space, its going to keep the messages stored on the local drive.

Here is the iCloud Storage window from my system preferences showing 20GB saved in iCloud:

Compared to my system storage showing just over 2GB: