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How on Earth does the blogger have only 1GB of iMessage data since 2009?

Mine gets bloated with images and videos to multi gigabytes in days, and it's unlikely that it's used only for text for 13 years. (I mean, it's either never used at all, or used for all sorts of media not just text, and since it has been used, it should be the latter)

Even if the actual media isn't stored in the database, all the metadata for all those messages should exceed 1GB IMO.



> How on Earth does the blogger have only 1GB of iMessage data since 2009?

Anecdatum: My `chat.db` on this laptop is 44MB for 30863 messages going back just under 4 years (basically just a handful of family.) I can see that being 1GB even for triple the length of time and many more interactions, sure.

The `Attachments` folder next to it, on the other hand, is 6.4GB.


Yeah for some reason I assumed the size is for both (db + attachments) while writing the comment, which is wrong.


In the iOS settings under Messages you can choose how long you want to meep your messages and content.

https://www.macrumors.com/how-to/auto-delete-old-messages-ip...


Yeah but I think the author has all the messages retained dating back to the beginning.


Author here. I have sent/received 643,576 messages since 2009 which totaled 590MB. To my knowledge media is never stored in the SQL database (for iMessage).


Wow. I thought it would be much bigger with all the indexes and many columns. (Even if the media itself isn't in the DB)

Thanks for the clarification.


> it's either never used at all, or used for all sorts of media not just text

This seems to be where you went wrong.




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