runoff

About

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 is called SDBR and it is 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 is written in C# using WPF, therefore it runs only on Windows. Moreover, it is 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.

Install

gem install runoff

Usage

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

What else?

Things to do in the future versions:

• Parse all of XML specific things in the message.
• Output how many files have been exported.

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