How to Find Out What Messages Apple Stores in ICloud
Hey! In this week’s Tech 911 , a column where we try to address your most pressing and dizzying technical questions (which you should definitely send us here ), I go a little beyond the column setup to look at a question that is both relevant and relevant to the majority of Apple fans.
Apple recently (and finally) introduced iCloud Messages, which we have written a little about in the last month, because it’s just a useful and necessary feature. However, with all the great new things, confusion comes; setting it up can be a bit of a headache, and apparently figuring out what it does is also questionable.
On Reddit, user amandanick7 writes:
“So my iPhone X said ‘downloading messages from iCloud’ since I upgraded to 11.4 a few days ago. The progress bar has no color, but my iCloud on my phone says 1.1 GB downloaded. How can I access messages that have supposedly been saved? I don’t see anything about iMessage on iCloud.com. “
Before we get to the messaging pool together, I just want to point out for a moment that Apple’s new feature – while incredibly useful for syncing messages between your (non-Watch) Apple devices – is a complete chip, given Apple’s 2012 restrictions. free iCloud storage.
Or, to put it another way, it’s time for Apple to show a little more generosity. The company, which is still trapped in Jobs’ ideas, really hates the word “free”, but even doubling the free version of iCloud to 10 GB, which is still small compared to 15 GB of free space on a Google account, works wonders. It’s annoying to see Apple doubling down on cloud features (photo storage, message syncing, and device backups, to name a few) without giving loyal customers the ability to actually use them without paying additional fees on top of their already expensive devices. …
Comes off the soap dish.
To answer this question from a Reddit user, I suggest two approaches. First, since your messages are now syncing to iCloud, there is an easy way to know exactly what’s going on there: get messages on any device that has this feature turned on.
I realize this is a bit of an excuse, but it’s basically true. If you sync messages to the cloud, then any message on your device will be what lives there and takes up space. And no, Apple doesn’t make it easy to see exactly which messages or attachments are causing you storage issues.
For example, on an iPad, by clicking on a person’s face at the top of a conversation in Messages and clicking the “i” for information, you’ll be able to see the images and attachments you’ve shared in the conversation:
While you can long press on any item to open the menu and remove it, there is no easy way to remove everything in one fell swoop – you also cannot sort images and attachments by size to get rid of the most important things first.
[Update] Thanks to Twitter user @stoinov who reminded me that you can see which elements in your conversations are taking up the most space – sort of. Open the Settings app on your iPhone or iPad, tap General, then Storage [device], then scroll down to find the Messages app. Click on that and you will see a small field for “Documents and Data” with many different categories such as photos, videos, GIFs, stickers, etc. Click on one of them to see which attachments are taking up the most space on your local device, which may not necessarily be what takes up space on your iCloud, depending on what devices you primarily use for messaging.
However, there is a way to see which conversations are taking up the most space on iCloud. To do this, on iOS, open Settings, tap your name (above), tap iCloud, tap Manage storage, tap Messages, and tap Conversations to see which of your chats are taking up the most space. You can delete the entire conversation at once by clicking Edit, selecting the conversations and clicking Delete.
You can also try limiting the number of messages stored by your devices by returning to the main settings screen, tapping Messages and selecting the new Message History option – for example, instead of forever, you might want to try using only your devices. store messages for up to a year. Anyway, how often should you go back and read such old text messages?
In my case, since I love saving everything and can’t get rid of anything, I just decided to pay Apple $ 1 a month for 50GB of iCloud storage instead of 5GB, which is more than enough for everything I do with iCloud. You won, Apple. I wave the white flag as much as I like.
Do you have technical issues that are keeping you awake at night? Tired of searching and troubleshooting Windows or Mac issues? Looking for advice on applications, browser extensions, or utilities that you can use to accomplish a specific task? Let us know! Let us know in the comments below, or better yet, write to david.murphy@lifehacker.com .