SMS/MMS messages

Well, Google One and these messages backups have been a freaking nightmare. Yesterday I realized my backup was 10GB which was insanely high. I wiped out my backup from Google One since the Messages app said 5GB of data was stored. I was thinking I could get some extra storage back in Google One.

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This morning, I checked my backup from overnight and sure enough, we're back at 10GB! Finally started reading some posts on here and there are so many complaints about how Google does the backup for this part. What I ended up doing was offloading all of my text/pictures to an external file on my computer. Here's where it got interesting.

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I started sifting through the data, and I was finding "deleted" text that Google was holding onto somewhere within the app that wasn't able to be found anywhere, even in the trash. These were deleted OTC text, spam text, etc plus the usual deleted text. I think that's absolutely shady on Google to do that, and part of me wonders if this is why so many people have GB's of data sitting there because Google is wanting people to intentionally buy extra storage.

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Sorry for the long post on this topic but what are some of y'alls thoughts? Seems this is a huge issue for so many people. I had to wipe out my backup this morning again then the messages app just to reset my backup.