Transfer Lion Messages to Mountain Lion Messages

[hogsdill]

Does anyone know how to transfer your message history from the Messages app in Lion to the new app in Mountain Lion?

It looks like my chat history in Lion is stored in Documents/iChats and in Mountain Lion it is stored in ~/Library/Messages/Archive.

I've moved the directories and chat.* files, but it still does sync what I had in Lion to Mountain Lion. Anyone else had issues? Thanks.

 

[criticman]

I am having the same issues. Looking at file info and permissions, I see no differences. I am curious if in the file structure itself (glanced at it in TextWrangler) that Apple marked the client differently from the Lion Beta and the Mountain Lion release (still Beta).

I wouldn't know where to begin checking though.

 

[hogsdill]

I am having the same issues. Looking at file info and permissions, I see no differences. I am curious if in the file structure itself (glanced at it in TextWrangler) that Apple marked the client differently from the Lion Beta and the Mountain Lion release (still Beta).

I wouldn't know where to begin checking though.

For some reason, my history is showing up now. I moved the chat.* files and the saved archive from Lion to the new Mountain Lion archive just as I mentioned above. I can't tell if it started working after a few reboots or after syncing my iPhone to the new install.

 

[criticman]

Oddly it is also now working for me. I did find earlier that if I searched inside the Messages search box, it was only searching through contacts I had been in touch with since the Mountain Lion upgrade. However, it was searching the full archive, not just 7/25->present. Now when I scroll back on that chat, it scrolls back full history.

I opened up other users and now their chat histories are there. Perhaps it needed to reindex the histories? In any event, it seems to be fully functional for me as well. Search only appears to be looking at users with threads open, whereas before it would search all chat transcripts for the keywords even if I hadn't chatted with the person in quite a while.

Anyway, very glad it is working as I use it without internal Jabber server and we pass code snippets/commands around (IT dept), so it was a nice quick reference source.

 

[phool27]

I can't tell if it started working after a few reboots or after syncing my iPhone to the new install.

My chat histories appeared after following your directions and restarting my system. Thanks to both of you!

 

[hogsdill]

My chat histories appeared after following your directions and restarting my system. Thanks to both of you!

That's great. Glad it worked.