I saved a copy of everything inside ~/Library/Messages/
which included a folder named
Attachments
that is filled with a bunch of subdirectories containing all my files ever attached to a message (images, documents, movies, etc), and three (3) files named:
chat.db
(about 20 MB file size),chat.db-shm
(33 KB), andchat.db-wal
(565 KB).
I opened the large chat.db
file and it contains all my messages in an SQLite database. I know this file contains all the information needed to rebuild my iMessage history, I'm just not sure how to convince the iMessages.app to do so.
I've been at this for about 60 minutes now, trying several different things (I'm not going to list out every one of them).
There's gotta be a way to restore my messages from these files that I saved.
There is some helpful information on the Apple discussion forum.
Basically, just need to move a backed-up
~Library/Messages
folder to replace the new empty~Library/Messages
folder.It may be that
chat.db
,chat.db-shm
andchat.db-wal
files are linked together with keys etc., so that may be the reason iMessages is not accepting the changes.https://discussions.apple.com/thread/5378830