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ThatSomeone

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Jan 9, 2016
320
70
Here, where else?
I've been having an issue since iOS 17 & macOS Sonoma came out where messages in iCloud inflated by 3x, from ~1GB to 3GB+ in mere weeks. It kept inflating when I did nothing but delete things. Like I mentioned in the linked thread, I tried calling AppleCare but ended up with nothing. The senior advisor just kept telling me it was my fault that my messages suddenly and rapidly inflated despite the fact that I had done nothing but deleting attachments and conversations, including anything new to confirm something was broken. I got lucky and was able to jump on a family member's 200GB plan when I ran out of storage, and it inflated by another gig since. I figured something was obviously wrong and that they'd fix it soon.

But now after updating to macOS Sonoma 14.2 I have stuck processes related to syncing messages. I've tried restarting my Mac and force quitting these processes, but they re-appear when messages tries to sync again and it gets stuck in a loop where there's a bar in Messages.app saying "Synchronizing with iCloud" that never moves. The exact same thing happened before on my iPad, and now on my iPhone every single time I open Messages since 17.1.1 released. I also had an issue where after updating to iPadOS 17.1.1 & .1.2 the area above the SoC got really hot and battery drained like never before in the half decade I've had my iPad, until I restarted it. And I realized now it's probably related to this... Something being broken server-side is one thing, but now it's seemingly affecting my devices directly where these infinite processes eats CPU and battery.

I have a few messages in various conversations from the past few years I'd rather not lose by nuking everything, not even being a guaranteed fix. I've spent so much time trying to troubleshoot and fix this, but it just keeps getting worse... I don't know what to do at this point, I'll try giving AppleCare another chance but any help is very much appreciated!

TL;DR: I suspect something broke with messages in my iCloud account right after iOS 17 & macOS 14 released. And now these backend issues seem to negatively affect all my devices without me knowing how to fix this myself without any data loss.
 

Bigwaff

Contributor
Sep 20, 2013
1,954
1,282
What a PITA. You could try turning off iCloud sync and signing out of iCloud on all your devices one at a time. Wait a some time (why and for how long?.. I dunno... maybe waiting isn't necessary) and then sign into iCloud on your iPhone and enable iCloud sync.
 

ThatSomeone

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Jan 9, 2016
320
70
Here, where else?
What a PITA. You could try turning off iCloud sync and signing out of iCloud on all your devices one at a time. Wait a some time (why and for how long?.. I dunno... maybe waiting isn't necessary) and then sign into iCloud on your iPhone and enable iCloud sync.
Yeah this is awful. Today my iPad also started showing that sync message every time I open messages on it...

I could try, but given that this is happening across all my devices it feels like the issue will still be "in the cloud". Is there anything I need to do a double backup of before signing out? I'm also wondering if I can just maybe disable the messages option in iCloud settings and then back on instead?
 
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