EDIT: Perhaps a better way to say all of the below, is this: Is there a way to restore my Message (iChat) history onto my iMac, from my iCloud backup? All of my iDevices have the complete chat history, so this seems reasonable.
Original post follows...
My system got into a very weird state today, so I decided the best option was to restore to a new HD from a Time Machine backup. The last backup I had was from a month ago, but it restored fine.
Now I have my new HD with 1-month old data, and my old HD with current data that I want to recover parts of.
I found today's messages transcripts in ~/Library/Messages/Archive and I can view them just fine. But even after I added today's folder to my live Archive folder on the boot drive, Messages will not see the current chats at all.
How can I "import" or "merge" or otherwise get my latest Messages transcripts to be blended in with the old ones?