Messages 4.2 GB, In iCloud 1,172,009 messages, and, guestimating:
Family groups – lots of traffic, many with image(s)
Business (Banks, Amazon, appointments, etc.) – lots of text traffic
SPAM & Phishing – modest but increasing
I have never previously checked this number on iCloud.
Retrospect: I do remember years ago noticing more than a million files in a full backup (well prior to APFS and separate DATA volume). These days I only check to ensure my data volume backups still fit on my media with room to spare.
The numbers seem to track pretty well for people who have messages set to delete after a period of time, but I can’t believe that those of us in the millions are seeing real data. I’ll have to poke around more.
Aha! A thread on MacRumors suggests these high numbers are basically just spurious entries in the database. It might be possible to get them back to normal by turning off Messages in iCloud for a month, and then doing a dance of turning it back on, based on a message late in this thread. I might do it for giggles.
Thanks for that link. So it looks like the database is full of “error 39” records, with each one counting as a message. We don’t yet know what error 39 might be, but if it’s something that happens on a regular basis (maybe failure to send keep-alive messages when there’s no data connection available), then that might explain the flood of records.
I’m with David C.; I’m often archive Mail for future reference, but always treat Messages as ephemeral – never to be saved indefinitely, and never shared to any other device beyond my iPhone:
Most often, I simply delete after reading; those I keep to recheck or whatever are deleted after 30 days anyways per Settings > Appos > Messages > Keep Messages. Not incidentally, I set “disappearing message time” similarly in Signal.
Now I’m thinking about the number of messages and emails I’ve exchanged over the last ten years and what that says about my life before and after digitalization.
I was assuming I would have an equally high number, but surprisingly my total is much lower. I would have considering myself a fairly heavy user too, at least for my generation.
462,236 (48.1 GB)
I have also used Messages since the early days and rarely if ever delete threads and messages (setting is to keep forever).
I’ve used Messages since it came out, but fewer and fewer correspondents use it.
In the old days it synced across devices on the same Apple ID, without iCloud, if I recall correctly.
I use it occasionally now and it works fine across devices with iCloud Messages off, so in my use case I don’t see what good it is to involve iCloud.
I’ve got 3,480,752 messages, using about 30GB of iCloud storage. Seems surprising, but I guess I do use it a lot, including pretty much daily, almost-real-time, conversations with my 3 grown kids. I guess I’ve been using it since the iPhone 3 came out. Before that I used iChat going back to .Mac and MobileMe; I wonder if those messages were migrated to the Messages app.
I notice that my ratio of storage space to number of messages is much higher than Adam’s and others’; that might be because my kids send me lots of attachments via Messages.
This was on 51 messages when I looked on my iPhone, and jumped to 171 messages when I looked on my Mac, where putting messages in iCloud had been set on OFF until I turned it on to get the screen shot.
I have only had an iPhone for eight months or so and I most of the 51 texts I got on the iPhone are security codes and spam, most of which I delete. I don’t text on the Mac but I do facetime with my neice. Where the other 120 messages on the Mac are a mystery.
Oddly, when I looked at iCloud for messages on my Mac I found 40.9 MB. (I don’t use Mail on my iPhone). No idea what that is or where it came from.
32,707 for me - a smidge under 5gb. I consider myself a light user of messages. I have Keep Messages set to ‘Forever’ but I could probably switch that to “A year” without much risk of losing anything super important.
