title: Restore OS X iMessages History from chat.db
body: <p>I saved a copy of everything inside <code>~/Library/Messages/</code> which included a folder named
  <code>Attachments</code> that is filled with a bunch of subdirectories containing all my files ever attached to a message (images, documents, movies, etc),  and three (3) files named:</p>
  
  <ol>
  <li><code>chat.db</code> (about 20 MB file size),</li>
  <li><code>chat.db-shm</code> (33 KB), and </li>
  <li><code>chat.db-wal</code> (565 KB).</li>
  </ol>
  
  <p>I opened the large <code>chat.db</code> file and it contains all my messages in an SQLite database. I know this file contains all the information needed to rebuild my iMessage history, I'm just not sure how to convince the iMessages.app to do so.</p>
  
  <p>I've been at this for about 60 minutes now, trying several different things (I'm not going to list out every one of them). </p>
  
  <p>There's gotta be a way to restore my messages from these files that I saved. </p>