Old messages and Videos in Messages availability

Whether your past messages and videos remain saved in iCloud depends primarily on how you manage your device settings and whether those messages were ever deleted from the conversation history. When a contact changes their number or you delete them from your Contacts app, the messages themselves are typically not automatically removed from your iCloud backup or sync.

If you use Messages in iCloud, your message history is synced across all your devices and stored in the cloud rather than being part of a standard device backup. Deleting a contact's phone number from your address book simply removes the name associated with that thread; the message history generally remains in your Messages app under the raw phone number or email address. As long as you do not manually delete the conversation thread itself, the text and video attachments should remain accessible in the cloud and on your synced devices.

However, there are specific settings that can lead to the permanent loss of these files. If you have the "Keep Messages"setting configured to "30 Days" or "1 Year" instead of "Forever," iOS will automatically delete old messages and their attachments once they hit that age limit, regardless of whether the contact still exists in your phone. Additionally, if you manually delete a specific message or a whole thread to save space, that action syncs across all devices, and the content is permanently removed from iCloud.

For videos specifically, these are often the first items to be "optimized" if your storage is low. If "Optimize Storage" is active, the full-resolution video might be stored in iCloud while only a small thumbnail remains on your device; if the link to the cloud is broken or the message is deleted, the video becomes inaccessible. To ensure you don't lose these videos, it is best practice to manually save them to your Photos app library, which treats them as separate files from the message thread.