I regularly delete all messages and call entries. Could not care less about reading any of them more than once.
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
#222Dropping in here to say that as a programmer I'm always super impressed with how easy it is to go back many years in WhatsApp via find and quickly scroll around it. Always makes me wonder if I'm doing something wrong in my client-server app which struggles at the tens of thousands scale and if I'd be better off re-architecting to replicate all data to the client and just using the insanely powerful CPUs that are available there. I'm sure if I did it in my high scale, highly mutable (esp access control), high user count application replicating all that state reliably would also become a nightmare, whereas whatsapp has a pretty clear replication model built in.
Re: It's virtually impossible to read old iMessages and they take up tons of storage
#223Apple'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…
iPhone is the only apple device I own but it crashes it can't go too far back into my messaging history for any one individual too far. Usually once I scroll to ~5 months back with people I text regularly the iMessage app just straight crashes ... it's a little absurd. To top it off, every couple pages it gives a loading icon and introduces severe latency for whatever reason. There don't seem to be any apps in their…
I’d also be interested in something that works with Ubuntu. I’d love it if you could give me a shout should you find something.
Re: It's virtually impossible to read old iMessages and they take up tons of storage
#224Re: It's virtually impossible to read old iMessages and they take up tons of storage
#225One of the options without using third party tools and sdripts:
1. Use macbook.
2. Open imessage and scroll 1 year back.
3. Export to pdf.
4. Ensure the pdf contains 1 year of chatting.
5. Delete all the messages that have just been exported.
6. Repeat above for another year.
In the end you will have a pretty looking archive of imessage.
Even an old 2013 macbook with 8gb RAM is capable of accomplishing this task.
Re: It's virtually impossible to read old iMessages and they take up tons of storage
#226I think people should get in the habit of deleting all their convos that are more than a month old. Most convos are 99.99% worthless, and it's very freeing to be rid of them. One of my friends had her H1B cancelled and was given a 10 year ban from entering the US because of her text messages. When she crossed the border back into the US, the border guards requested her phone, and searched it and found messages to her…
Yup auto delete your old messages, social media and downloads. Forward anything importantly email and archive that locally; or photos and self hosted blogs. That works for me.
Re: It's virtually impossible to read old iMessages and they take up tons of storage
#227Apps that are not have a good export story should be considered as keeping your content hostage. Either treat these as ephemeral, syndicate the content into them or switch. Your content in their app is lock in.
Re: It's virtually impossible to read old iMessages and they take up tons of storage
#228Earlier quoted context omitted.
Related, I emailed Tim Cook about iPhone sensor future plans, and a high-level exec of like 25+ years wrote back to me within a week. Apple is remarkably good at getting back to cold emails to top execs.
Interesting, perhaps I’ll cold email them about the pinned contact feature in iMessage being totally worthless. If it just pinned the message thread to the top and didn’t change the icon to a giant circle that sometimes doesn’t show notifications, it’d be fine. I pinned my GF’s message thread and I ended up missing lots of messages and notifications from her and ended up unpinning her so the notifications would show…
Same here. Shocked that managed to get past an initial beta.
It defeats the entire purpose of pinning.
Re: It's virtually impossible to read old iMessages and they take up tons of storage
#229Apple'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…
> "Apple's chat.db has an esoteric schema" This is basically one taken out of microsoft's .doc format playbook. At first I thought Apple was slow and just didn't have time to get to some sort of export for iMessage chats. Mail had imap, calendar had caldav, address book had carddav. The original mac stuff did other standards like AIM and jabber. But over time I began to suspect, then later those internal emails expos…
>But over time I began to suspect, then later those internal emails exposed in the lawsuits made it clear - apple was holding everyone's messages hostage.
In an SQLiteDB any programmer can learn to navigate, and any third party can build a tool to export them?
Sorry but the "internal emails" prove nothing about Messages. It's just a quick and dirty implementation that "works good enough" for reading the latest, but not as an archive.
Re: It's virtually impossible to read old iMessages and they take up tons of storage
#230After years of herding imessages i went ahead and deleted everything older than a year. i encourage othes to consider doing the same. its been great for me.
Why are we so hung up on keeping texts? (I'm guilty of this hang-up too.) I didn't archive my AIM messages. I don't record my phone conversations.
The article mentions 2 examples in the 1st paragraph. Maybe not common, but to each their own.