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dewey • yesterday at 3:53 PM • 5 replies • view on HN

Don't run "du -h ~/Library/Messages" then, I've mentioned that many times before and it's crazy to me to think that Apple is just using up 100GB on my machine, just because I enable iMessage syncing and don't want to delete old conversations.

One would think that's a extremely common use case and it will only grow the more years iMessage exists. Just offload them to the cloud, charge me for it if you want but every other free message service that exists has no problem doing that.

Replies

epistasis • yesterday at 5:36 PM

    sudo du -sh ~/Library/Messages
    Password:
    du: /Users/cvaske/Library/Messages: Operation not permitted
Wow, SIP is a bit more insidious than I remember. Maybe I should try it in Terminal.app rather than a third party app... I wonder if there will ever be a way to tell the OS "this action really was initiated by the user, not malware, let them try to do what they say they want to do"

Edit: investigating a bit more, apparently the lack of a sudo-equivalent, an "elevate this one process temporarily" command is intentional in the design, so that malicious scripts can't take advantage of that "this is really the user" approval path. I can't say I agree with that design decision, but at least it's an ethos.

bee_rider • yesterday at 4:17 PM

Offloading to the cloud and charging the user seems like a bigger breach of expectations than the hard drive space.

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dawnerd • yesterday at 4:19 PM

Same with photos. You can enable the option to offload but there’s no way to control how much is used locally. I don’t know why messages does that either. Also no easy way to remove the hundreds of thousands of photos in messages across all chats.

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bensyverson • yesterday at 3:56 PM

Agreed, it should work like the iCloud Photos library; cache locally, but pull from the cloud when necessary.

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latexr • yesterday at 5:08 PM

System Settings > General > Storage. Click the ⓘ next to Messages. Sort by size and delete large attachments.

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