**Does "Disable & Delete" actually purge Messages in iCloud before a fresh Move to iOS import?**
I'm migrating from a Galaxy S24 Ultra to an iPhone 17 Pro Max and I've hit a duplication problem I want to understand before I try again.
What happened: I ran Move to iOS, then enabled Messages in iCloud. iCloud already held my message history from an earlier migration attempt, and instead of deduplicating, it merged — so now every conversation has each message twice. Erasing the iPhone only clears the local database; the iCloud copy survives and comes straight back down on the next sync. My understanding is that this means another migration would give me three copies, not one.
My plan is to run Settings → iCloud → Messages → Manage Storage → Disable & Delete to empty the cloud dataset first, wait until it reports 0, then erase the iPhone and run Move to iOS into a completely empty Apple-side store.
My questions:
1. Has anyone actually confirmed that Disable & Delete fully purges the cloud dataset, and that a later re-enable uploads the local database as the new authoritative set rather than restoring the old one? I've seen at least one report of messages reappearing after re-enabling sync.
2. Does the 30-day retention window cause problems if you re-enable Messages in iCloud before it expires?
3. Is there any way to preserve roughly a week of iPhone-only iMessages through this, other than extracting them from a local backup and re-injecting them on the Android side before migrating?
Any confirmed experience appreciated — I'd rather not discover the answer the destructive way.