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It's virtually impossible to read old iMessages and they take up tons of storage

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Re: It's virtually impossible to read old iMessages and they take up tons of storage

#141

Post by judge2020 »

prpl wrote: post #130
KishanBagaria wrote: post #65

Apple's chat.db has an esoteric schema owing to the fact they never designed it from the ground up and instead kept adding new columns and tables with each macOS release. This makes their queries super complicated with multiple joins. Once you have the schema figured out, it's dead easy to build a third-party client that works better than the official one. Even search works great with a simple LIKE query but Apple re…

I had done something too, but I also needed a Manifest.mbdb parser to reconstruct backup to disk, then process the messages and copy all the images around to make it work. I did it mostly to make a simple-to-read archive of chats before deleting them.

Did your work turn into some potentially sharable shell scripts, perhaps? Would be a useful tool to avoid having to store messages in iCloud.

Re: It's virtually impossible to read old iMessages and they take up tons of storage

#142

Post by sneak »

The complete iMessage history in your backups is also not e2e encrypted, so all of it is readable by Apple. They regularly turn this information over to US federal authorities without a warrant (so, no probable cause) too.

Having such a huge trove of history of all of your communications saved that can be accessed by the police or a rogue Apple sysadmin at any time is something that I feel should even make the law-abiding nervous.

Re: It's virtually impossible to read old iMessages and they take up tons of storage

#143

Post by alisonkisk »

chrischen wrote: post #127

It seems like a lot of iCloud storage-using services are conveniently designed to just keep eating up more and more space. Take photos for example: most people only need to archive old photos and rarely access them, but such a use case isn't really supported by iCloud photos. You either keep your entire collection in the cloud and in a state of fast (expensive) retrieval, or not at all. For iMessages every photo or v…

Can you catch downscale them with applescript/automator on a Mac?

Re: It's virtually impossible to read old iMessages and they take up tons of storage

#144

Post by cozzyd »

KishanBagaria wrote: post #129
600frogs wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just took a look at your product, I'm very impressed and have added myself to the waitlist. I'm almost even more impressed by the domain name itself though - how on earth did you manage to bag that domain?!

Bought it at the right time from the right person :)

domain first, then figured out the product?

Re: It's virtually impossible to read old iMessages and they take up tons of storage

#145

Post by dehrmann »

sackerhews wrote: post #21
dehrmann wrote: post #12

> A tale of wasted space and Services revenue With photos, I guess this could end up being around 1GB. Maybe this will push you off the free plan to the $1/mo plan, but I don't see it being that big of a needle-mover for services revenue.

There are 1 billion iPhones in current, active use. A dollar from each of those is 1 billion dollars. That's a nice bonus, no matter how much the needle moves. https://appleinsider.com/articles/21/01/27/there-are-1b-ipho...

You have a point that it adds up. I just suspect that your photos eclipses the size of your texts.

Re: It's virtually impossible to read old iMessages and they take up tons of storage

#146

Post by sumnole »

KishanBagaria wrote: post #65

Apple's chat.db has an esoteric schema owing to the fact they never designed it from the ground up and instead kept adding new columns and tables with each macOS release. This makes their queries super complicated with multiple joins. Once you have the schema figured out, it's dead easy to build a third-party client that works better than the official one. Even search works great with a simple LIKE query but Apple re…

Anyone know of something similar for Android texts?

Re: It's virtually impossible to read old iMessages and they take up tons of storage

#147

Post by rokobobo »

saagarjha wrote: post #13

My sister was having a problem where she was taking all the iCloud storage for our family because she keeps sending videos to people but couldn't figure out a way to efficiently delete them. I had to write up a Python script ( https://gist.github.com/saagarjha/615dee3c04e226b44828e910a5... ) to scrape the iMessage database for large attachments, and then print out the text to messages around it so that you could sear…

When I am on the iMessage dialogue screen with a contact, I can usually click on their name, then Info, and it displays all the video/photo attachments sent in that chat. I believe I can then delete them from there. Is that useful? I guess if there's a number of photos you'd like to keep, but not the large videos, it's a more complicated issue.

Re: It's virtually impossible to read old iMessages and they take up tons of storage

#148

Post by stevenhuang »

chmaynard wrote: post #66
closeparen wrote: post #58

On your Mac, iMessages are stored in a SQLite database which you can inspect. https://spin.atomicobject.com/2020/05/22/search-imessage-sql...

That's an undocumented implementation detail. It might change without warning at any time. Are you seriously recommending this as a solution for users who want to be able to read past messages?

Your indignation is strange.

Why would you not recommend it when there's no alternative?

Re: It's virtually impossible to read old iMessages and they take up tons of storage

#149

Post by cmckn »

KishanBagaria wrote: post #65

Apple's chat.db has an esoteric schema owing to the fact they never designed it from the ground up and instead kept adding new columns and tables with each macOS release. This makes their queries super complicated with multiple joins. Once you have the schema figured out, it's dead easy to build a third-party client that works better than the official one. Even search works great with a simple LIKE query but Apple re…

Woah, that's a heroic effort. Can't wait to try it! Huge thanks :)
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