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Is it possible to move messages from an El Cap install to a Sierra install?

I am toying with the idea of installing Sierra on one of my Macs that is currently running El Cap. I've got many years' worth of messages in iMessage.


Is there a way to copy the messages from El Cap to Sierra?

Posted on Aug 17, 2020 12:27 PM

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Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Posted on Aug 24, 2020 1:37 PM

I went ahead today to see how to do this (and I installed High Sierra instead of Sierra but no matter).


When I did the clean install of High Sierra I didn't log in to iCloud because I wanted to copy messages over from El Capitan, which obviously doesn't store messages in iCloud.


But when I connected my user account to the drive that holds the main user folder that I have used on El Capitan for several years, the Mac automatically logged in to iCloud. This caused lots and lots of messages to show up in the High Sierra Messages.app.


The messages include the messages pulled from iCloud, but what I am wondering is if all old "non iCloud" messages that were on El Capitan are there or if they may have been over-written by what's in iCloud. Any thoughts on that?


12 replies
Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Aug 24, 2020 1:37 PM in response to BDAqua

I went ahead today to see how to do this (and I installed High Sierra instead of Sierra but no matter).


When I did the clean install of High Sierra I didn't log in to iCloud because I wanted to copy messages over from El Capitan, which obviously doesn't store messages in iCloud.


But when I connected my user account to the drive that holds the main user folder that I have used on El Capitan for several years, the Mac automatically logged in to iCloud. This caused lots and lots of messages to show up in the High Sierra Messages.app.


The messages include the messages pulled from iCloud, but what I am wondering is if all old "non iCloud" messages that were on El Capitan are there or if they may have been over-written by what's in iCloud. Any thoughts on that?


Is it possible to move messages from an El Cap install to a Sierra install?

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