If you are willing to risk loosing your messages and/or ruin your installation and if despite what I wrote previously you want, you can try to copy your messages files and delete the original files (and put them back later).
Read once entirely before you begin.
The easyest way is to do it from your computer’s terminal, if you can, so you can copy-paste the commands. See here.
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If possible, have a computer to read this page.
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Have a reliable backup freshly made of your phone
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Reboot the phone, don’t open messages
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Go into plane mode (to avoid receiving a message while manipulating the messages files)
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Activate developer mode into settings and input a password.
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Launch the terminal (or do it through ssh) and write:
devel-su
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Enter the password you just recorded into Settings’ developper mode page
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Write (you can write only the begining like “/ho” and press tab, the shell will complete the path for you):
cp -a /home/defaultuser/.local/share/commhistory /home/defaultuser/Documents/commhystory_save
to copy the messages directory into /home/defaultuser/Documents/
To verify the dirs are identical:
diff /home/defaultuser/.local/share/commhistory /home/defaultuser/Documents/commhystory_save
The only output should be:
Common subdirectories: /home/defaultuser/.local/share/commhistory/data and /home/defaultuser/Documents/commhystory_save/data
if you have attachments in the messages. If not, the output should be nothing.
If the command outputs something else, stop here and report.
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Remove the original files with (be careful with this command, an error could be fatal!)
rm -fr /home/defaultuser/.local/share/commhistory/*
the star “*” means “all files/dirs”
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Now, launch the messages app.
Of course, you will have no messages any more.
Try to close it to see if the problem persists.
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Now you can copy your message files back:
cp -a /home/defaultuser/Documents/commhystory_save/* /home/defaultuser/.local/share/commhistory/
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Verify that msg AND attachmentsare are back by launching the app.
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If you wish, you can delete the copied messages directory (but I’d wait a bit, never know…):
rm -fr /home/defaultuser/Documents/commhystory_save
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You can de-activate the developer mode and airplane off.
I tried these commands on my phone while I was writing but it is not a 100% guarantee it will perfectly work on your side.