Here is our state of affairs: my daughter is attempting emigrate from an outdated iPhone 7 to a (less-old) iPhone 12. The whole migration went with out a hitch apart 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’ve decided the next:
- iCloud Message syncing is turned On on the older cellphone. Nevertheless, on that cellphone Messages are taking over 5.6 GB of storage, and in iCloud messages are solely taking over 2.8 GB of storage.
- On her Macbook Air (which is also signed in to the identical iCloud account) Messages are taking over 2.8 GB of storage (identical as in iCloud); and many the messages that she will be able to see and browse in her outdated cellphone don’t present up in her Macbook Air. These lacking messages seem like scattered randomly all through her message historical past (or at the least we’ve 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 exhibiting up within the iPhone 12.
All of this appears to strongly counsel that the issue is that messages should not importing from the outdated cellphone to iCloud.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. Nevertheless, once we try to try 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’ve been on this very same state of affairs earlier than, with a unique (even older) cellphone, and once we hit the “Disable and obtain?” button all the messages that had been regionally 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’ve additionally encountered different individuals on-line who’ve had the identical expertise, together with some who’ve explicitly warned customers to not belief Apple Retailer “Genius” staff, a lot of whom will faucet that button with out understanding that it has precisely the other impact of what’s meant.)
Simply to finish the story, we’ve tried establishing the iPhone 12 three other ways:
- From an iCloud backup — this clearly didn’t work, because the iCloud backup is incomplete.
- From a neighborhood backup on a pc. She backs up her cellphone commonly however apparently (and to my nice frustration) these native backups do not comprise 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 concept — skip the iCloud intermediary and switch instantly from one cellphone to the opposite! However once 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 technique to power the outdated cellphone to renew syncing with out tapping the dreaded ‘Disable and obtain’ button and danger dropping all of her messages?
- Alternatively, is there some technique to power a neighborhood backup of the cellphone that accommodates 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 software or third get together 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 achieved, is there some technique to export your complete Message library into some large textual content archive or PDF file in order that she will be able to at the least maintain and learn her outdated messages, even when outdoors of the Messages app itself?
Any recommendation you may provide can be appreciated, we’re at our wits’ finish with this. Virtually her complete teenage social life was carried out inside Messages and he or she actually doesn’t wish to out of the blue lose half of it at one go.
