I recently upgraded from a 7-year-old MacBook, and I have been trying to transfer the imessage history to my new macbook with little success.
Does anyone know if this is still possible on the new Mac OS?
I have been digging through forums and have tried all suggestions to no avail. I've replaced the new laptop's messages folder, did the same with the ichat containers, and also changed all folder ownership. Still, whenever I open up iMessage, it only shows my messages from today and yesterday.
Any advice would be much appreciated.
Best Answer
Since your message archive didn’t migrate the first time, I would do this:
I use the PhoneView app to manage messages on macOS so that might be an option if Apple can’t update and migrate the data with their normal tools.
It’s targeted at managing messages from macOS, but the free trial might show you if it will help manage / archive your messages in a meaningful way on the mac side. I’m sure someone knows forensically how to parse the database files, but that needs some special work based on your exact macOS version. Maybe someone with that skill will see this and answer how to directly open the files from ~/Library on the old mac and then transform them / process it to load from the newer macOS app.