Here is our state of affairs: my daughter is making an attempt emigrate from an outdated iPhone 7 to a (less-old) iPhone 12. The complete migration went with no hitch aside from one giant-sized hitch: roughly half of her Message historical past doesn’t present up on the brand new cellphone. On additional investigation, we now have decided the next:
- iCloud Message syncing is turned On on the older cellphone. Nonetheless, on that cellphone Messages are taking on 5.6 GB of storage, and in iCloud messages are solely taking on 2.8 GB of storage.
- On her Macbook Air (which is also signed in to the identical iCloud account) Messages are taking on 2.8 GB of storage (identical as in iCloud); and plenty of the messages that she will be able to see and skim in her outdated cellphone don’t present up in her Macbook Air. These lacking messages look like scattered randomly all through her message historical past (or a minimum of we now have not been capable of finding any sample to which of them are lacking), and (so far as we will inform) are the identical messages that aren’t displaying up within the iPhone 12.
All of this appears to strongly recommend that the issue is that messages are usually not importing from the outdated cellphone to iCloud. The obvious factor to strive subsequent can be to show off iCloud Message syncing on the iPhone 7 after which flip it again on once more to see if that forces a resync. Nonetheless, after we try to do this we get the “Disable and obtain?” immediate, and we’re very leery of taking place that path, as a result of (surprising twist) we now have been on this very same state of affairs earlier than, with a distinct (even older) cellphone, and after we hit the “Disable and obtain?” button all the messages that had been domestically saved however not backed as much as iCloud had been completely deleted from the cellphone and couldn’t be recovered.
(Parenthetically: I do not know if that is what “Disable and obtain?” is supposed to do, however we now have additionally encountered different folks on-line who’ve had the identical expertise, together with some who’ve explicitly warned customers to not belief Apple Retailer “Genius” workers, a lot of whom will faucet that button with out understanding that it has precisely the alternative impact of what’s meant.)
Simply to finish the story, we now have tried establishing the iPhone 12 three other ways:
- From an iCloud backup — this clearly didn’t work, for the reason that iCloud backup is incomplete.
- From an area backup on a pc. She backs up her cellphone commonly however apparently (and to my nice frustration) these native backups do not include her full Message historical past both, presumably as a result of she has iCloud syncing turned on.
- Utilizing “Fast Begin”. This appeared like a promising thought — skip the iCloud intermediary and switch straight from one cellphone to the opposite! However after we opened the Messages app for the primary time on the brand new cellphone it was initially empty, and began downloading messages from the server.
So right here is the ask:
- Is there some strategy to drive the outdated cellphone to renew syncing with out tapping the dreaded ‘Disable and obtain’ button and threat dropping all of her messages?
- Alternatively, is there some strategy to drive an area backup of the cellphone that comprises her message library, once more with out tapping the D & D button?
- (Getting more and more determined:) Is there a way (together with, I do not know, a command-line instrument or third occasion app) to export her full Message library from the outdated cellphone and import them manually into the brand new cellphone?
- If neither of these may be carried out, is there some strategy to export your entire Message library into some large textual content archive or PDF file in order that she will be able to a minimum of maintain and learn her outdated messages, even when outdoors of the Messages app itself?
Any recommendation you’ll be able to provide can be appreciated, we’re at our wits’ finish with this. Virtually her complete teenage social life was performed inside Messages and he or she actually doesn’t wish to all of the sudden lose half of it at one go.