Search can’t find old messages on new phone

[DDustiNN]

I mentioned in the other thread that I had this same issue when I migrated my iPhone 11 to my 14 Pro during last year's launch. Both were on iOS 16.1 at the time, but I could not see older messages on the 14 Pro under default view. If I searched for the name of the contact who sent them, the messages would appear.
I didn't hear much noise about it, but they quietly managed to fix the issue by iOS 16.2.

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/ios-16-2-bug-fixes-changes-and-improvements.2372828/page-11?post=31802788#post-31802788

I think this is different. I can still see all threads, all messages, etc, under the default view. I can scroll back to 2012 and see everything. The issue is that they don’t appear in search results, despite very clearly being right there on the phone.

 

[BreakingKayfabe]

I think this is different. I can still see all threads, all messages, etc, under the default view. I can scroll back to 2012 and see everything. The issue is that they don’t appear in search results, despite very clearly being right there on the phone.

Same. This is what is so frustrating. Messages search has gotten me out of some real jams. I hope this is fixed soon.

 

[DDustiNN]

Same. This is what is so frustrating. Messages search has gotten me out of some real jams. I hope this is fixed soon.

Have you tried a reset/restore? I haven’t done mine yet but hopefully today.

Also are you using iCloud messages or is it disabled?

 

[BreakingKayfabe]

Have you tried a reset/restore? I haven’t done mine yet but hopefully today.

Also are you using iCloud messages or is it disabled?

Thing is I did a restore on the new phone from a phone that had the search working great. So I’m not feeling doing a whole other restore and adding all my Apple Pay cards over again.

I’ve always used iCloud messages. It’s on on all of my devices.

 

[TooMuchPhone]

Anyone here going to try the beta to see if this fixed the indexing issue? I’m considering.

 

[DDustiNN]

Thing is I did a restore on the new phone from a phone that had the search working great. So I’m not feeling doing a whole other restore and adding all my Apple Pay cards over again.

I’ve always used iCloud messages. It’s on on all of my devices.

I did the same, restored from a (still working) backup from iPhone 13 Pro. Since the 15 Pro is not working, I’m not even sure if doing a backup and restore would even help.

 

[DDustiNN]

Anyone here going to try the beta to see if this fixed the indexing issue? I’m considering.

Oooh I was waiting for this. Just checked earlier today and still nothing, but glad to see it’s out now. Downloading now and I’ll report back!

 

[dario1326]

Is anyone else having issues with iMessages older than a month not showing up after transferring from old iPhone to iPhone 15/Pro? Has anyone found solution if you did experience that. It just seems like iMessage will not index at all. Even after turning off and turning on Sync iMessages.

Thank You

 

[Banglazed]

I'm seeing this too. Some results earlier this year but not seeing all results. I did not restore from any backup but just iCloud sync.

 

[DDustiNN]

Anyone here going to try the beta to see if this fixed the indexing issue? I’m considering.

Installed the beta, and my messages search results still haven’t been fixed 😡

 

[TooMuchPhone]

Installed the beta, and my messages search results still haven’t been fixed 😡

Wow - thanks for trying

 

[DDustiNN]

Well I reset my phone and it’s currently restoring from iCloud backup. Currently zero search results as of right now, but hoping that changes as the data downloads. We shall see.

 

[Morac]

Well I reset my phone and it’s currently restoring from iCloud backup. Currently zero search results as of right now, but hoping that changes as the data downloads. We shall see.

Index data isn’t restored as part of the backup. It gets wiped and the phone has to index again. Normally this happens overnight while plugged in. If you have a lot of messages it could take days, but it should make noticeable progress. You won’t be able to tell if it works until you’ve had your phone plugged in for a while as it will also have to index photos too.

I found some Reddit posts about this problem, including one that mentioned the problem was happening in the developer beta 7 release.

From the ios community on Reddit

Explore this post and more from the ios community

reddit.com

From the iphone community on Reddit

Explore this post and more from the iphone community

reddit.com

From the iOSBeta community on Reddit

Explore this post and more from the iOSBeta community

reddit.com

Plus a blog post, though that just references one of the Reddit posts.

iMessage search history not working after iOS 17 update

Apple allegedly working to fix issues with iMessage search history not working, photos/texts missing or not syncing after iOS 17 update.

piunikaweb.com

Basically though this sounds like a bug that Apple introduced in one of the later betas. When I get the chance I may try reaching back out to Apple Support. They closed my issue after sending me a link explaining how to search messages.

edit: next post in this thread should be the following. Click to skip past unrelated posts that got merged in. https://forums.macrumors.com/thread...d-messages-on-new-phone.2404157/post-32573370

 

[dannys1]

Well this is an absolute nightmare for me. It appears i'm the only one and it's not a widespread, known or common bug.

Upgrade to my iPhone 15 Pro on Friday. I didn't pay close attention to messages at the time but noticed a favourite friend I spoke to was blank. It was until last night I realised that I could only search back 30 days on a message to a business partner I speak to a lot.

It now appears that ALL messages prior to 30 days have been deleted.

I did not choose this, I did not manually delete anything. It the oldest message is 23rd September, so it makes sense it happened when I moved to my new phone.

There is the option on each device to keep message history, "forever", "one year" or "30 days". However this doesn't apply to your entire message history in iCloud, just that device - eg if you were low on storage and didn't need 15 years of messages synced to the device.

There appears no manual way I could have achieved this. You can go into iCloud and permanently delete messages however that would delete everything, not everything prior to the last 30 days.

Every device has synced to this, Mac, iPad, iPhone. I tried to restore from a 22nd Sep backup for the iPhone 14 Pro only to find out if you have iCloud sync on for iMessages they don't even go into the iCloud backup, so that is useless for this too.

At this moment in time all messages dating back to 2008 have been permanently deleted through no choice or fault of my own and there's no system or function to restore them.

I have Apple looking into and waiting for them to get back to me, but unless they have a server side trash can that we don't see or have access to which stays full for 30-40 days like it does on my phone...I assume it's not possible.

For other users I don't know what to suggest, obviously I upgrade every year and i've never had this and no one else appears to have it - but worryingly if any glitch happens in the cloud like this - we don't have a backup anywhere on devices unless you turn off imessage syncing and then take a backup of that device (but then if you turn it back on, these messages are deleted it) it really seems you need a way to restore messages better than this!

 

[matrix07]

There is the option on each device to keep message history, "forever", "one year" or "30 days". However this doesn't apply to your entire message history in iCloud, just that device - eg if you were low on storage and didn't need 15 years of messages synced to the device.

Are you sure about this because I understand it differently. After reading the post I went to check & sure enough mine set at “Forever”.
What I understand “forever” means is I’ll have my messages forever. When my phone is low on space however the past messages were deleted on the device *only*.
Since I sync message with iCloud “Forever“ means forever in iCloud and “30 Days” is 30 days in iCloud Perhaps I was wrong but that’s what I always believe.

 

[dannys1]

This appears a little better than the bug I've got in that when I set up my iPhone 15 Pro on Friday (and updated to iOS17.0.2 first - ALL of my messages prior to the last 30 days have been deleted - this has been synced with iMessages on iCloud and now I can't get any of my 15+ years worth of messages back. Not something I choose or selected. I have Apple looking into it but I don't hold much hope.

 

[dannys1]

Are you sure about this because I understand it differently. After reading the post I went to check & sure enough mine set at “Forever”.
What I understand “forever” means is I’ll have my messages forever. When my phone is low on space however the past messages were deleted on the device *only*.
Since I sync message with iCloud “Forever“ means forever in iCloud and “30 Days” is 30 days in iCloud Perhaps I was wrong but that’s what I always believe.

No i'm pretty sure it's a device specific switch. It's the settings for that specific device - and to delete messages from iCloud you're (supposed to) go into iCloud settings and manually delete the iMessage data.

Even by Apples cloud management standards it would make little sense to be able toggle one device attached to your iCloud account to keep messages for 30 days and have it immediately delete 15 years worth of messages from it and all other devices synced to iCloud with way to restore (especially when if you manually delete a message you have 40 days to restore it on any of your devices)

The fact that this is a discussion is really not good at all and shows that Apple don't have things clear.

It should be possible for all off us to backup messages away from the cloud too - without convoluted settings like having to turn iCloud Sync off to have them appear in an iCloud back up. This is a mess.

 

[matrix07]

yeah I agree that the switch to delete iCloud message should be in iCloud, not Messages.

One thing you can try is contact Apple. They could bring your messages back. Good luck!

 

[rutiger]

Wife and I got new 15PMs. My iMessage history and everything came over fine. Her phone has nothing older than yesterday which is when she got the phone and we set it up. Not awesome.

Everything else synced fine. 49K+ photos, music, podcasts, everything iCloud related seems fine just no iMessage history whatsoever. It's all still present on her old phone and MacBook.

 

[dannys1]

It's all still present on her old phone and MacBook.

At least that’s something I guess. For me it’s been deleted in iCloud itself which is now only 200mb so it’s been deleted from all other devices too.

Unless Apple can retrieve server side I only have one option and that’s a macOS Time Machine backup. Probably with restoring the Messages folder us that I don’t believe you can get this to sync back to iCloud so it’s mostly useless.

I’ve just pulled back 15gb of messages from Sep 2022 and before and I can view them but trying to sync them doesn’t seem to work

 

[Morac]

No i'm pretty sure it's a device specific switch. It's the settings for that specific device - and to delete messages from iCloud you're (supposed to) go into iCloud settings and manually delete the iMessage data.

That setting isn’t device specific. If you read what it does it says messages older than what you set it to will be permanently deleted. If you have iCloud messages enabled, those deletions sync to iCloud and the messages get deleted on all devices.

If the setting is set to Forever and the phone is low on space then old messages will be removed from the device, but will be redownloaded if you try to go to look at them.

Basically if you had the setting set to 30 days, what you are seeing is expected. The only way to recover the older messages would be if you had backed up to a Mac or PC prior to changing the settings from Forever to 30 days.

Now should that setting be there if iCloud Message is enabled, probably not but unfortunately Apple isn’t that great at putting settings where they should be.

 

[matrix07]

Now should that setting be there if iCloud Message is enabled, probably not but unfortunately Apple isn’t that great at putting settings where they should be.

Apple took their sweet time to implement Messages iCloud sync. Before that history setting was for on device only. One could set on iPhone to 30 days and it would keep on iPhone 30 days and on iPad a year and it would keep messages on iPad a year as well.
When Apple gave us option to sync to iCloud they didn’t bother to change or move that setting. That started the confusion I think.
I remember I had always set it to 1 years out of concern of my phone space. When Apple finally sync Messages to iCloud I gladly change that to Forever since I know I now have iCloud space to hold it. And the behavior is exactly what I expect. All my messages are on my phone but if I browse through previous months the messages will be downloaded to my phone. They’re actually not on my phone.

 

[dannys1]

That setting isn’t device specific. If you read what it does it says messages older than what you set it to will be permanently deleted. If you have iCloud messages enabled, those deletions sync to iCloud and the messages get deleted on all devices.

If the setting is set to Forever and the phone is low on space then old messages will be removed from the device, but will be redownloaded if you try to go to look at them.

Basically if you had the setting set to 30 days, what you are seeing is expected. The only way to recover the older messages would be if you had backed up to a Mac or PC prior to changing the settings from Forever to 30 days.

Now should that setting be there if iCloud Message is enabled, probably not but unfortunately Apple isn’t that great at putting settings where they should be.

Well I didn't have it set to 30 days.

Further more if what you're saying is true - and i'm still not sure it is. That is an extremely destructive setting. You toggle it off on one device, there's no warning it will delete anything in the cloud - it could instantly delete 15 years worth of message off all your other devices with no way to recover.

Yet you manually delete one spam message and its sat in recently deleted for 40 days for you to recover.

That makes zero sense to me. That's also not how it works on Apple Mail - you can keep only the latest X amount of days downloaded - but it doesn't delete anything from the server. If a switch does this it needs to carry a very heavy warning that requires multiple entries of a passcode to achieve.

Regardless of this - this setting has never been changed on any of my devices. So unless the new phone turned it on temporarily, deleted everything and set it back to forever after a restore - that's a pretty horrific bug i'm sure we'd be seeing lots of people with.

I do have time machine backups of download chats - there's multiple issues with that thought. You can restore them back on macOS but it won't put them back into iCloud for other devices. Also at some point around May it deleted the downloaded database on macOS so it went from being over 300mb to just 4mb and I need to merge all those databases with a manual script.

 

[Morac]

I decided to reach out to Apple Support again and this time I was told that engineering has indicated this is a problem they are working on. The agent told me that statement was put out internally as of September 26. The agent said the engineers aren’t requesting logs which would seem to imply that they could reproduce it locally, so hopefully it gets fixed in either iOS 17.1 or 17.2.

On a side note, while I was demoing the problem for the agent I found there is actually an old message on my iPad that wasn’t found by search and a really old one on my iPhone that was. As such searching might be having issues on a much larger number of people’s devices, they just might not have noticed it yet.


edit:

Next post in this thread should be the following. Click to skip past unrelated posts that got merged in. https://forums.macrumors.com/thread...d-messages-on-new-phone.2404157/post-32574739

 

[adrianlondon]

Unfortunately, that setting in "settings" does apply to messages in iCloud. The setting itself should sync over to your other devices.

Recently, Apple have been storing deleted messages on the device which deleted them, but I'm 99% certain that's only for manually deleted ones. You could check. They've hidden the deleted folder under the "Edit" button top-left when in iMessage and not in an actual thread.