curious about the progress in getting version 3 in to the Mac App Store (per your website info)?

and, will that app provide a nicely formatted PDF export option (with attachments thumbs inline)?

thanks :-)

Hey,
this is so great, I had been looking for this. Unfortunately, when running the app on my Macbook it did not create a back up of the attachments on the messages. It's unfortunate because I was looking forward to viewing all files shared with specific contacts.
I am also looking for a way to do this directly from an iPhone backup, not the macOS Messages app but the actual text messages on my phone. Any ideas or references?
Thanks again Peter! Great job

Fantastic work on this program -- there's such a huge need for it. Thanks so much!

I'm finding when I run it (v2.0 on High Sierra 10.13.1) that no related attachments are being found. 211 conversations (although 144 of them are empty), and zero attachments. Any idea of what might be happening?

Not a programmer, not sure how to download the file from this page. I click on Download ZIP but it just downloads an empty 3kb directory called "backup-master." I copied and pasted the script file and could run it from the command line but apparently it needs other files. It gave me an error ("cannot execute binary file").

I have the macOS app too but it doesn't backup message attachments, which is really what I want to do.

The file linked on the "app" website for version 2.0 will not mount - maybe it is corrupt?

I'm looking to extract a maps location someone sent me in a message. I used this tool to extract the chat transcript, but the line where they sent the pin is empty. Is there any way to do this? Thanks!

Hello! First, I'd like to thank you all (both of you?) for a marvelous piece of work. I've just downloaded and run baskup, and it seems to have worked. That said, I actually got more than what I expected or wanted really. It's a minor point, but since I wanted to say "thank you" anyway, thought I'd mention this.

When I copied contacts from iCloud to "stored on my Mac", I only copied one contact as that was the only contact for which I wanted a "complete record". As it turned out, I got 122 folders - approx the same as the 107 iMessage conversations currently on my MacBook. Also, the one contact I did copy over from iCloud was identified only by phone number, not by the contact's name.

After running baskup (osx application) I have plaintext backups (which is great), but each text file has a series of lines, then the same series of lines again.

Baskup is exactly what I was looking for! Thank you so much!

After running it, I realized that I also have a lot of imessages saved on an older computer that I'd like to access. Of course I tried running the Mac app, but it's not supported. Do you have any other recommendations?

(side note incase it's related, I actually can't even find the directory where chat.db is saved on this old machine)

Feature Request

Problem

• Over the years, I have installed many fresh copies of OS X. Every time I have installed a new Operating system I have saved the contents of ~/Library/Messages.
• After exploring the sqlite files, I have realized that many of them overlap causing duplicates)

Solution

• Ability to unify / merge multiple iMessage backups into one backup solution.

Bonus Feature

• Ability to restore unified backup

I'm interested in adding a new function to baskup that will provide some statistics on the conversations that are archived. For now, the one that's of most interest to me is a statistic that shows how many words each party to a conversation has "contributed". I have a few other ideas, but for now, this meets my needs. And so, for a selected backup file, my proposed function would list the total number of words I have contributed, and the total number of words the other party has contributed.

I've outlined a v. general approach for this; I'll do it in bash and/or awk. My question is this: Does the database from which the text in the backup is made include any data that would make this unnecessary - or aid in the implementation?

Last update here was two years ago, and I don't see the app in the Mac App Store. Is this thing dead?

All of my backup files just show the messages that my friends sent to ME, but not the entire conversation showing what I wrote to THEM. Is that correct? How can I get it to show both sides of the conversation?

Hi Peter,

First, thanks for developing baskup. This has been a useful application for me personally. I'd like to report an issue I'm having with the latest version. When I run baskup, my iMessage baskup files are all coming up empty. Attached is the baskup screen once the backup completes. On my disk, baskup does create a directory for each and every message thread, but the files are all zero length.

I'm using baskup 2.0 and running MacOS 10.12.6.

Am I doing something wrong (it worked on an earlier release of MacOS) or is there possibly an incompatibility issue?

Thanks for your help.
Chris

I just tried this on el capitan, and after making sure all of my contacts are on my mac, I then click backup and show files. It takes me to a directory filled with files without extensions and no folders. Some strange behaviors:

• No folders? What happened to my images?
• No file extensions? Seems they should all be .txt?
• Group chats have names like: chat followed immediately by 18 numbers.
• Some contacts are separated having two separate files like +xxxxxx and [email protected].
• How do I find a group chat between three specific people?

MAC OS 10.14.2

Complete Terminal Output:

"(standard_in) 1: parse error
Error: unable to open database "/Users/[myname]/Library/Messages/chat.db": unable to open database file"

Though this has been occurring throughout Mojave, I have noticed that baskup will crash (the graphical app) and that the shell script will return "unable to open database file". I am using baskup 2.0 and the latest version of the shell script.

Hello,

The app works well although I noticed there is not much metadata about the messages that could be useful for my appliations. Namely, it would be nice to get

• the name of the sender rather than just 'Friend: '.
• the datetime of each message.
• any other metadata that can be parsed would be also helpful

Is it possible to get this? Thank you.

I've installed baskup.app on my system. I want to submit a Pull Request to add a feature I've implemented in awk, but the source is available for only baskup.sh. It seems that baskup.sh doesn't exist on my system, and so I'm unclear as to if and how a Pull Request against baskup.sh gets incorporated in baskup.app?

Thanks for putting together a simple solution with a great README 😄

However, I attempted to use this handy script and was greeted with an ocean of "No such file or directory" errors

Here is one example

cp: /Users/larryvar/folders/vt/s5[TRUNCATED]/IMG_4874.PNG: No such file or directory

The username us simply larry . E.g.

==$ echo $HOME
/Users/larry

It looks like a bad separator match or something?

The only line that looked like it could be responsible for the bug is https://github.com/PeterKaminski09/baskup/blob/master/baskup.sh#L56, but I haven't dug super deep.

Oh, and a bonus feature, imo, would be a second flag/function to walk through the directories and create a merged "All Attachments" dir.

Cheers,
CP

Hi. Great job on Baskup.

Would it be possible to reference attachments (images etc) in the backup files?

Also, it would be great if the backup lent itself better to automatic parsing, fx. by being formatted in JSON, XML or similar, or at least being able to choose it as an option when running the backup.

Thanks for making this tool Peter. For whatever reason Adium's import is failing me completely, and this does the trick.

Adding the feature of date/time stamping the transcripts each line would be a huge benefit.

It is very simple to customise baskup.sh, but I am curious why the decision was made to hardcode the script folder.

hey Peter, thanks for putting this together.

question, is there a version of the desktop application available on the desktop app store? just curious

Can you share your build process/documentation/files for us so we can build ourselves if we desire?

Running under Yosemite I get (asterisks added to protect the innocent)-

user (master ) baskup-master $ bash baskup.sh
<open file '/tmp/dumped.txt', mode 'r' at 0x104481810>
mkdir: +614_: File exists
mkdir: Attachments: File exists
backUpMessages.sh: line 44: iMessage;-;+614_: command not found
usage: mkdir [-pv] [-m mode] directory ...
mkdir: Attachments: File exists
backUpMessages.sh: line 44: +614***_: command not found
mkdir: can*******@126.com: File exists
mkdir: Attachments: File exists
backUpMessages.sh: line 44: iMessage;-;can_*******@126.com: command not found

etc

Thanx much - your script was exactly what I needed. As ArundelDesigns mentioned, date/time would be a fantastic addition.

What might i be doing wrong?
running the script on a mac with os 10.12.6 (sierra) i get great output AND dates for each line.

running the script on a mac with os 10.13.6 (high sierra) - no dates.

ASIDE 1:In both, i get (standard_) 1: parse error as soon as i launch the script,
ASIDE 2: get "cp: [path name] is a directory (not copied).
ASIDE 3: see "/Users/mcvar/folders...No such file or directory" (and considering that "mcvar" isn't a user i can believe that but that's weird

but the MAIN ISSUE is NOT getting the dates on the macbook air running high siera - in neither case have i altered the script in any way.

any idea what to poke to get the dates to print?
Thank you

mc

It just shows blank after @

I starred this repo because I was impressed with the app but I also just wanted to say nice job. I found it throughly useful. Did exactly what I needed and didn't waste time with thrills.

Perhaps most importantly, it was free.

So THANK YOU. Close this issue whenever you feel like it.

:)