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This is not related to the broken Messages app.

After I formatted my drive, installed clean El Capitan and received a code on my iPhone I can send iMessages from my Mac. Messages are received by my contacts and I can also see them on my phone.

The problem is that I would like to see all existing (previous) messages I have on my phone, again in my Messages.app. That is, everything I wrote before formatting the drive.

I haven't made any backups. I thought that simply everything will be synchronised like Contacts etc.

Currently only newly created messages are visible. Since yesterday, I've been reading a bunch of topics. Is this normal? Or am I missing something? As I said, it doesn't look like a sync issue since the new messages are working.

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    Messages aren't synchronised at all, they're picked up & stored per machine. You'd need to have a backup of the archive & database to restore from.
    – Tetsujin
    Commented Nov 29, 2015 at 8:19
  • OK, so making long story short - if I don't have a backup from a particular machine, I won't be able to get Messages back after formatting the drive, right?
    – Matt Komarnicki
    Commented Nov 29, 2015 at 8:21
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    I don't think so. You can't resync them from an iPhone, unless something like iExplorer might be able to do it. I've done some fiddling with the messages structure over the years, but I don't really have cut & dried, definitive answers for a lot of it yet.
    – Tetsujin
    Commented Nov 29, 2015 at 8:23
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    Not synchronising Messages between devices is not what I was expecting but for security reasons I can understand that... well... thanks anyway.
    – Matt Komarnicki
    Commented Nov 29, 2015 at 8:25
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    Welcome. I just checked, you can export via iExplorer, but not in a format you can import to Messages by the look of it.
    – Tetsujin
    Commented Nov 29, 2015 at 8:27

1 Answer 1

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Since you formatted your drive, your old messages will no longer exist on your computer. Unfortunately, iCloud does not sync iMessages with OS X as of this time. You also can't sync up using iTunes either. It's possible that you could extract them from your phone, but you wouldn't be able to simply put them back into the app again.

In the future, should you reformat, you should backup your user's library folder as this contains most customizations you have set for your apps, along with the iMessages you had before.

Even if you had made a backup, however, the structure of messages will likely change over time and I know some folks even from Yosemite were unable to simply pass these files from a backup to El Capitan.

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  • You didn't read carefully. I did a clean install. Disk was formatted. So that means that Messages aren't synchronised via iCloud or something similar?
    – Matt Komarnicki
    Commented Nov 29, 2015 at 8:12
  • Ah, I'm sorry, I'll update my answer.
    – user116913
    Commented Nov 29, 2015 at 8:14
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    @Barry - the archive is at ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.iChat/Data/Library/Messages/Archive the database & attachments are at ~/Library/Messages/Archive/
    – Tetsujin
    Commented Nov 29, 2015 at 8:17

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