This is a such wrong reply. The OP did not complain about his message history, he was talking about message histories of all his friends and relatives. Do you really think it could be socially acceptable to approach each of your friends and relative and tell them: "If message histories are your only copy of family/friends photos, you're doing it wrong." ?

I don't even think it is acceptable to approach each of your friends and relatives and pester them with some technical issue that shouldn't exist in the first place. The proposed fix just isn't a viable solution.

This is true, but on the flipside it's hardly Apple's fault if the only copy they have of highly important and sentimental photos is a cached messaging stream. There are countless ways to back up that data. It's like blaming Microsoft because you didn't save transferred files during a Skype session. Once they're on you're end, they're your problem. Apple's job is to send them and make sure they arrive, that's it.

This bug sucks and Apple's solution isn't a good one, but that rebuttal is equally weak. Use PhoneDisk, PhoneView or one of the other methods to pull a text messaging history if it's that important to you and then blow it away.

I wasn't even commenting regarding the stuck number, which is clearly an issue. I was arguing that this: "the vast majority of messaging I’ve done in the past 3 years are group messages with pictures of our children."

It just screams data loss to ruin your day. I was (kinda) hoping OP would see that and maybe rethink his storage plans, because otherwise he'll be posting "wahh my photos weren't backed up" soon enough.