The Message History Limit
If you use the built-in Messages app (iMessage) on your Mac to text friends and family, you might be surprised to discover that old conversations are silently disappearing. To help users save hard drive space, macOS includes an automatic deletion feature that purges all messages and attachments once they reach 30 days old. For users who rely on their message history to reference old addresses, photos, or sentimental conversations, this automatic deletion can result in devastating data loss.
How to Keep Your Messages Forever
You can easily instruct the Messages app to retain your entire chat history indefinitely, ensuring that no text or photo is ever deleted unless you manually remove it yourself.
1. Open the Messages app on your Mac.
2. In the top menu bar, click on the word Messages (right next to the Apple logo).
3. Select Settings from the drop-down menu (or Preferences on older versions of macOS).
4. Ensure you are on the General tab at the top of the window.
5. Look for the dropdown menu labelled Keep messages.
6. Click the dropdown menu. If it is currently set to “30 Days” or “1 Year”, change the selection to Forever.
Managing Your Storage Manually
By selecting “Forever,” your Mac will permanently save every single text message, video, and high-resolution photo sent or received through the app. Because these files are no longer being automatically purged, your Messages database will grow significantly over time. It is highly recommended that you occasionally open the app and manually delete large video attachments or group chats that you no longer need, preventing the application from consuming gigabytes of valuable disk space.