techrider

Sharing caveats and consequences from my experience setting up, not specifically included in the 2 official articles Apple has posted at https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208532 and https://support.apple.com/en-jo/ht207428.

1. Caveat - not for under 13 AppleIDs.  If you have a family member with an under 13 AppleID, at least in Canada, Messages in iCloud looks available but doesn't work because it requires 2 factor authentication which an under 13 AppleID doesn't support.

2. Consequences from my setup experience

I started by turning on Messages in iCloud by enabling it on my iPhone first, but not before deleting old messages or message images/attachments I no longer needed.  The setup worked as expected, and after some time the Downloading (or Uploading) Messages from (to) iCloud message went away.  On to the iPad.

I took a gamble that enabling Messages in iCloud on the iPad without a "pre-cleaning" wasn't necessary, hoping that it would recognize another device is already using the feature and simply sync with that content.  Wrong.  It uploaded everything from the iPad, which was then downloaded to the iPhone.  Oh well.  I cleaned up the messages on the iPhone again, and the changes sync'd to the iPad.  On to the Macs.

On my Mac mini, based on what I learned from the iPad, I painstakingly deleted A LOT of messages that dated back 5+ years.  I never cleaned these because of Messages for Mac's lack of bulk-delete capabilities (yes I'm aware of methods posted by others - option+command+delete doesn't work on any of my Macs, nor does deleting the Messages folder in ~Library... Apple Support got involved as well and still no luck).  Anyway, with them removed, I enabled Messages in iCloud.  The sync took a very long time - so long that I just left it overnight.  Next morning, in the end, all of my effort to supposedly delete the Mac's old messages was pointless.  They all re-appeared on the Mac mini, and were sync'd to my iPhone and iPad.  In case you're wondering, the 'Save history when conversations are closed' option is not enabled.  At this time, I chose not to delete them again, just yet, as I still have a MacBook to setup.

On the MacBook, this was a bit simpler as it had just been rebuilt without a Time Machine restore, so Messages had just one message in it.  I enabled Messages in iCloud and waited, again for a long time, for the messages to sync.  Eventually they were all there.

Now I deleted all of the messages I no longer wanted, using the iPad (which has the easiest (for-me) to use interface to bulk delete.  All the deletes immediately sync'd to the iPhone, Mac mini, and MacBook!  

That's when I realized that there were unique-to-device messages remaining on each device.  I deleted those on each respective device, and finally, I had an equal number of messages remaining across all devices that were in sync.

Last thing I noticed is, in a few of the messages, pieces of the conversation were missing (e.g. something I wrote, something the other person wrote was on 1 of the devices, but not the other 3).  This I have no fix for, but I'm not too concerned.

I hope you find this helpful, or at least relatable in a commiserative way.

Does emoeller said:

Can't get Messages on my Mac to sync via iCloud.  All of my iOS devices seem to work.  Anyone else have this issue?

Details including Mac are published at https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208532

You have to read footnote 1 in https://support.apple.com/en-jo/ht207428 for confirmation that once Messages in iCloud is enabled, messages are now stored in general iCloud storage (which still counts towards your free 5GB or paid storage plan), rather than iCloud Backup storage.

Since most of the storage space is used by images and attachments, it would great to have a one-tap option to select all images / attachments, to delete them in batch (instead of having to select each of them one at a time one before tapping trash, or by deleting the entire conversation)

That was good and funny ad, sure to make Samsung owners feel confident in their smartphone of choice.

The title “Moving On” is also very appropriate since, had she upgraded to the latest iPhone instead of a Samsung, it would have been titled “Moving Up”.

Just consider what 10nm means for a moment. That’s the width of approximately 20 silicon ATOMs! Astounding...

My favorite quote comes at the end, re: accountability with suppliers.  "Our philosophy is our money doesn't break after we give it to them so their parts shouldn't break after they give them to us."