If you have an iPhone, and you have a moment to check, will you look at Settings > iCloud > Messages and see how many you have. The number it is reporting for me seems wildly off. It amounts to 72 messages a day since the iPhone was released.

@amerpie My count shows 11.300. Still looks like a lot to me, since I mainly use WhatsApp and my use of Messages is anecdotal, but nowhere near 400.000.

@amerpie I’m seeing 64,487.

@crossingthethreshold I am still trying to figure mine out. I went through a deployment of about 400 laptops in 2023 where I got multiple 2FA messages per device, but that would explain only a small percentage of 400+K. This was all sparked by finding a sudden spike in the system data on my iPhone.

@amerpie to also set at only keep for a year and 2023 is not in that time frame

@amerpie I see nearly that many .. but that is across the lifetime - that said my storage is at 13.7 gig .. a lot of multimedia I guess.

@JohnPhilpin I had it set to Forever until a few days ago. The number didn’t change after I shortened the interval to 1 year.

@amerpie mine says 429,874 messages. Really close to the same number, I just wish they had some decent way for you to offload them onto a hard drive in some manner that can be read by humans.

@amerpie 387,253 messages, 30.8GB storage. Set to keep forever.

My first iPhone was a 4, I think.

@kwlblt How large is the system data on your phone? Mine is sitting at 70GB plus 20 GB for the operating system.

@amerpie 34GB yikes.