runoff

Important. Microsoft has finally added an option to export chat history to Skype, therefore, this gem is no longer necessary and most likely will not be updated.

A few years ago I had enough of loosing my Skype chat history every time I reinstalled the operating system, so I decided to write a small application that could export it as plain text files. The application was called SDBR and it was an open source project that I do not maintain anymore. Why? I could say that I lost my interest in it, but the real reason probably is the implementation.

SDBR was written in C# using WPF, therefore it ran only on Windows. Moreover, it was a GUI application. Yeah, that's a problem, because you don't need the GUI for this kind of functionality. runoff is a command-line tool, that automates the process of exporting your chat history.

gem install runoff

To export all the chat history.

# save a Zip archive in your home directory
runoff all skype_username

# save a Zip archive in a specific directory
runoff all skype_username -d ~/backups

# export database that isn't located in the default path
runoff all -f ~/main.db -d ~/backups

To export specific chats.

runoff some skype_username

If you don't want to put files into an archive, use --no-archive option.

runoff all skype_username --no-archive

runoff some skype_username --no-archive

Sometimes you might want to use the exported data in a different app, therefore runoff has an option to export in JSON instead of TXT. You just need to specify an adapter using -A option.

runoff all skype_username -A json

The resulting JSON file contains an array of objects with 3 keys: date, user and message. Each object represents a single chat record.

If you have something to say about this gem or anything else, you can find me on Twitter as @aigarsdz.