As already mentioned:
Apple said:
Delete messages and attachments in Messages on iPhone
In Messages on iPhone, delete messages, attachments, and entire conversations.
support.apple.com
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Search can’t find old messages on new phone
- Thread starter Morac
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Yes you're right - I honestly find that absolutely baffling. Regardless that isn't my issue but I still think its very poor from Apple - i've found searching at least one thread on their forums of someone who did this by accident.
Now i'm assuming that during the setup on the new phone, at some point it's default or changed to last 30 days and then back again to forever when it's finished restoring without my input, that's the only thing I can think of.
Very possible/probable. This is one reason why I’m an advocate of Apple decoupling major OS releases with hardware releases — it just compounds potential problems and makes troubleshooting (for users and Apple) a much higher hassle.
It seems to make sense as the oldest messages in the cloud are the day i set up the iPhone. Everything is still on "forever" and was never changed - which means i've got 40 days worth of messages on all devices now.
I've managed to recover a lot from Time Machine backup - but it's messy - at some point macOS start breaking apart devices stored on the system. Up to May this year it looks like if they were in the cloud it wasn't saving everything on device anymore. Merging them together is very hard if not impossible due to the complexity of the sqlite database they use. They also don't upload back into the cloud which isn't too much of a big deal it just means they're on Mac only.
I agree completely with the phrase "extremely destructive" --- I know this isn't the same but honestly I have my setting to 'Forever' so I can occasionally look through old messages with people who have passed, like my mom. I won't even be doing the software upgrade on my 14 Pro until I know for sure this (huge!!!! to me anyhow) issue is confirmed resolved. I'd be absolutely devastated to lose all those messages and history.
It is crazy that it's even an option. There's an option to delete messages directly in the icloud pane and I think that should be the only way - when you actively seek out to remove them from the cloud due to space. I've now mostly lost the messages I had from Dad who passed away - although I've restored things in a messy sense in macOS they're gone from my iOS devices now - even if someone does that switch on purpose they should be left in the cloud unless they purposely delete them from there - it's very odd from Apple.
Ugh, that's exactly what I'm trying to prevent. I'm so sorry this happened to you and I so so hope you're able to get those messages restored. Losing a parent is so hard. 💜
I agree with waiting. Even with the public betas, plenty of potential problems slip by. And I did wait for the .2 and .3 releases before upgrading on recent major OS rollouts. However, with an iPhone 15 PM order (which will at best arrive no later then the 17.1 drop), I feel it’s not as helpful to hold off upgrading other iDevices until later updates. Although, so far, I’ve held off on macOS Sonoma.
A recommendation: properly archive. Don’t use Web browser tabs as bookmarks, don’t leave never to reply to messages in Mail, do not use Messages as a frozen in time vault. I say this after learning the hard way a few times.
For most items, including Mail messages, save to PDF typically does a great job. Unfortunately, for Messages messages, Apple doesn’t appear to have a seamless method (yet?), so you’d need to deal with these:
How to Export Messages From the Mac and Save Them Into a Readable Format
When it comes to sending messages back and forth to your friends, there are a lot of different apps to do so. But what about those sent via iMessage with
appletoolbox.com
I agree with waiting. Even with the public betas, plenty of potential problems slip by. And I did wait for the .2 and .3 releases before upgrading on recent major OS rollouts. However, with an iPhone 15 PM order (which will at best arrive no later then the 17.1 drop), I feel it’s not as helpful to hold off upgrading other iDevices until later updates. Although, so far, I’ve held off on macOS Sonoma.
A recommendation: properly archive. Don’t use Web browser tabs as bookmarks, don’t leave never to reply to messages in Mail, do not use Messages as a frozen in time vault. I say this after learning the hard way a few times.
For most items, including Mail messages, save to PDF typically does a great job. Unfortunately, for Messages messages, Apple doesn’t appear to have a seamless method (yet?), so you’d need to deal with these:
How to Export Messages From the Mac and Save Them Into a Readable Format
When it comes to sending messages back and forth to your friends, there are a lot of different apps to do so. But what about those sent via iMessage with
Thankfully my backup is generally super tight, multiple onsite copies with a raid 5 NAS, also backblaze and iCloud - everything is triple backed up.
The worrying thing about the message thing is that there's no way to automatically back them up. You've got to turn off iCloud sync and then manually backup your ~/Library/Messages folder - no one is really doing that. Also as mentioned it looks like around May something changes on macOS end where your chat.db no longer holds EVERYTHING and the cloud has taken over, a cloud you can't access or manually back up - it doesn't go into your iCloud back up for iOS, no longer will Time Machine back everything up.
I'm left trying to merge SQlite3 DB files together but it's really not going very well - the schema is so complex and any attempts people have made to do it online are really old now. With every version of iOS and macOS Apple have added more rows. It's pretty messy.
I do have a HTML export of everything in a folder now but unfortunately it's just listed by phone number with no main index to navigate.
I was curious about this, and I don't think that setting syncs over to your other devices. I've got a secondary iPhone, iPad, and Apple ID and figured I try this myself. Messages in iCloud is turned on for both, and both were set to keep messages 'Forever'. I changed one of them to '1 Year', but the other device stayed on 'Forever' and never did sync the setting. The iPhone is on iOS 17 and iPad is on iPadOS 15, so maybe that had something to do with it...but I'm pretty sure it's a device only setting (none of the other settings on that screen are intended to sync), which makes this even more messier and confusing. It could mess up one's iCloud messages if they don't fully understand how it works. I think there's definitely room for improvement here.
Why were 2 threads that had absolutely nothing to do with each other merged?
My original thread was a problem with search not finding older messages on the phone. This problem is being seen by a number of people.
The thread it was merged with was a problem where one person’s older messages were deleted.
The only thing in common is that they are both related to Messages. Can the threads please be split apart?
edit: I renamed the thread title back to the old one as the new title had nothing to do with the original posts in this thread. Unfortunately that means there’s unrelated posts in this thread now, but oh well.
My original thread was a problem with search not finding older messages on the phone. This problem is being seen by a number of people.
The thread it was merged with was a problem where one person’s older messages were deleted.
The only thing in common is that they are both related to Messages. Can the threads please be split apart?
edit: I renamed the thread title back to the old one as the new title had nothing to do with the original posts in this thread. Unfortunately that means there’s unrelated posts in this thread now, but oh well.
I wondered the same - mine has nothing to do with search not working. Mine was a glitch that appears to have deleted all messages older than 30 days old whilst setting up the iPhone 15 Pro.
Nope, still no luck.
I’m curious if anyone has tried iOS 17.0.3 yet and if it’s fixed there.
Not fixed - I called Apple and they said they are still working on it.
You’d think this would be a story here - it’s a super annoying issue
That could be for iOS 18. I’ve had Apple “working” on issues for years that they never publicly acknowledged.
If we’re lucky they might fix it for iOS 17.3 or 17.4.
I agree, it was one of the very first things I noticed when I switched to the iPhone 15 Pro, and is also one of the biggest dealbreakers for me. It’s leaving me quite torn as to whether or not to keep my perfectly working 13 Pro.
I reset my phone and got a new phone, neither helped. My friend who set up as new had no issues.
Now, I just had something magical happen…
SUDDENLY ALL OF MY SEARCH RESULTS ARE APPEARING!
Pictures and links history are also there, and even have a message at the bottom that they’re indexing.
I have no idea what finally kickstarted this process, but I’m happy!
iOS 17.1b2 if it makes any difference. Although yesterday there was still no change, and everything was still missing.
Did you install 17.1b2 yesterday? Indexing occurs when charging so if you plugged in overnight and they fixed it in 17.1b2 that would explain it.
In the meantime. I’m on 17.0.3 and an attachment I keep deleting off my iPhone keeps coming back. It’s not in the message thread as I deleted the message days ago. It only shows up when I tap on the profile pick of someone I’m messaging. I delete it. Next day it’s back.