When setting up a new iOS device or installing the Messages Beta on OS X, you can log in with your iMessage account to start receiving & sending messages with iMessage.
One advantage of iMessage is that these messages are received on all your devices — meaning that as long as you have iMessage configured on a device, you can see the history of a conversation.
But as far as I can tell, you can only see messages which have been delivered after you set up your iMessage account on a device. Is there a way to load old messages which were sent/received before setting up iMessage? (I'd like to load both old messages within a current conversation/thread, and old conversations which have not recently received messages.)
Best Answer
I just transferred all my chat history by copying
~/Library/Messages
from an existing (OSX 10.8) machine to a new one (OSX 10.10).Couple of things to note:
chat.db-shm
andchat.db-wal
from~/Library/Messages
on the new machinesudo kill -9 pid
in a terminal). To find out which process (and the pid) is holding on to those files I used the excellent What's Keeping Me. It found the culprit process, but I wasn't able to kill it from within it (and hence had to resort to killing from a terminal).I am happy with the above and am not too worried about the list of open conversations not being restored as long as the history itself is there.†w