Trying to debug iMessage in iCloud syncing: messages not deleting long-term and being propagated again and again continuously from iCloud on multiple devices, constant warnings about message syncing being paused at the bottom of the Messages app on iOS, or syncing that, when triggered manually, starts and then stalls forever, and so on. On my iOS 17.6.1 iPhone I go to Settings > my profile > iCloud > Manage Account Storage > Messages > Disable and Delete. (A similar thing can be done in macOS from the Messages app under the iMessage tab; when you turn off Messages in iCloud, you are asked if you want this only for that Mac or for all devices, and you choose the latter.) It briefly says “Turning off …” and then the error in the title, “Unable to update iCloud settings at this time.”
I have tried all the usual (non-)solutions proposed on the Interwebs: signed out of everything except the one device (very painful, especially on Apple Watch where you literally have no option but to wipe and then restore from backup, which then affects global iOS settings for the paired phone), made sure that message syncing is off for each device individually before trying to delete, turned it off and on again (reboots, resyncs, etc)—nothing works. I can’t have the iCloud space consumed back, and I can’t troubleshoot my issues and get this stupid feature working properly. I despair, and I suspect I’ll have to talk to someone in Apple Support.
Does anyone have any ideas? Any silver bullets I may have missed?
Tab puked on the carpet by the back door again this morning. I think it was a hairball, so I gave her a brushing down. She likes that, but I do wish she’d make it outside. At least it’s always in the same spot, which is considerate.
Oh, and messages are syncing again. These two things may or may not be related and I honestly could not say what made it start working, or whether any of what follows had any bearing on it whatsoever. I went into iCloud storage and removed all the top conversations. My heart nearly stopped when I found the most important conversations missing in the Messages apps on Mac and iPhone—I thought it must still be syncing, even though it’s clearly off. But nonetheless I methodically removed every conversation from every device, leaving behind a single “master” copy on a non-syncing device. On my empty iPhone, I turned syncing on again, and was relieved, but also strangely irritated, to find both my two most important conversations fully in tact and a lot of dross from ages and ages ago that I then had to re-delete. I also checked the Recently Deleted view, and cleared all that out, too. Then I pressed Sync Now again, and it worked! The message under the button just read “Synced just now”, which is all I needed to see. Now with an “empty” synced store, I brought my master Mac online, and it propagated just the messages I wanted back, and also reported a successful “Synced just now”.
So yeah, a mystery solved, without real resolution. My very best guess: downloading messages from iCloud conflicted with messages already in the local store. So before you enable syncing in iCloud, start with nothing. This is obviously much harder when your conversation history is fragmented across devices, so I was lucky that this wasn’t my case. You just have to make sure that you have at least a single copy of everything. I daren’t try to mess with it now it’s working, and especially, to bring this back to the topic title, not to try to disable syncing altogether on iCloud, which simply hasn’t worked. Maybe now it’s in a “consistent” state, it would work, and in principle I could undo it. But I don’t really feel like taking the risk.
The Apple Support discussions have a thread or two on this issue; all were never answered by people who understood it, and are no longer taking replies.
I’m obviously mad, so I braved trying to disable syncing again today. It did not work, of course. Same error.
I also notice that syncing is more than 12 hours out, even though my phone has been happily sat on its charger for a while now.
I’ll just have to remember to check it from time to time, especially when I’ve been away from my Mac for a while. Sigh. Another chore I’d rather not have to do, but it seems this aspect of syncing, like the constantly-unreliable Safari tab syncing, is just prone to failure unless spot-checked from time to time. I can see how that might happen if you tend to move between devices. I can only suggest manually triggering a sync when you suspect a problem, or just every now and again, or when moving from one device to another. At least new messages are not affected—only deletions. And it looks as though the Watch uses the same infrastructure, because it’s catching up to deletions too, now that syncing is working again.