You can check whether or not your Mac is configured to save iMessages locally by opening “ Preferences” and looking at whether the “ Save history when conversations are closed” option is active. If you’re rocking a later version of macOS, there’s a chance that your iMessages haven’t been saved to the hard disk at all, as Apple is leaning more and more towards a cloud-only approach. If you can see them, then your messages are (probably) intact and you should copy them to a USB stick or an external drive.You’ll be looking for folders called “Attachment”, “Archive”, and “CloudKitMetaData”, and a file called “chat.db”. Open up finder and navigate to ~/Library/Message.If your iMessages disappeared from your Mac – as in, if they’re not showing up in the iMessage app, your first step should be to check if they’re physically still on the disk.Įxactly where they’ll be depends on which version of macOS you’re using. How can I restore individual message threads?! Some of those message threads are 5 years old 🙁 Lost a week’s worth of iMessages and don’t know why – they were there a few hours ago. The command will ripple out and scrub them from everywhere. This is not the case if you accidentally delete your iMessages while connected to a network. This level of redundancy means that you losing one or more of your devices isn’t a complete disaster – your iMessages will still be available to you on your secondary Apple devices, and can be restored from the cloud. They’re on your MacBook, your iPad, your iPhone, on any other device you own which begins with “ i” and they’re stored in encrypted form on Apple’s servers ( actually Amazon, but never mind that right now) in the cloud. Under ideal circumstances your iMessages should be on every apple device you own. By default, your Mac stores iMessages in ~/Library/Message.

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