Skype is one of the most used VoIP (Voice Over Internet Protocol) service. You can easily audio/video call one or more people on Skype and even chat with them via IM (Instant Messaging). A temporary chat history is created when you chat with someone, which the user can easily see as long as it stays.
However, some of your chat history might be important, especially if you are using Skype for business, so backing up all your chat history permanently is the solution.
In this tutorial, we are going to show you how to backup your skype chat (including call logs) right from your PC.
Enable Skype data storage on your computer
We need to make sure that Skype stores data on your PC so you could create a backup out of it. To check if Skype stores local data or not, open Skype and click on “Tools” from the top menu. From the menu that opens up, click on “Options”.
In the “Options”, click on “Privacy” and then click on “Privacy Settings”. Here you will find a heading “Keep history for” with a drop down menu below it. Make sure it is set to “forever”, not “no history”.
Create a backup of Skype’s chat history
Now that the chat history is being recorded in your PC, let’s back it up. Quit Skype and make sure it is completely shutdown: closing the Window will not work, you will have to right click on the Skype icon in the Taskbar and select “Quit Skype”. After that, press Windows+R keys on your PC and “Run” dialog will open up (you can also access “Run” from Start menu). Here, type “%appdata%\Skype” and click on “OK”.
This command will open all the Skype data in a Windows Explorer window. pen the folder with the name of your Skype username. Inside that folder, you will see a file named “main.db”. This file contains all the data of your Skype chat. You will have to copy and store it somewhere safe from where you can restore it easily. You can burn it on a disc, copy/paste to a USB flash drive, or just keep it safe over a cloud storage service.
Restore the Skype chat history
To access the content of the .db you just copied, you need to restore it back to the same folder and see the content in Skype app. You can also open and edit the .db file using a dedicated viewer software such as Microsoft SQLite. To restore, all you have to do is navigate to same folder (following the above process) and paste the backed up “main.db” file here.
There will be a new “main.db” file here, so Windows explorer will ask whether you want to replace the file or keep both. Just select “Copy and Replace” option and the backed up “main.db” will be added.
Don’t worry about the new “main.db” file containing your new chat history data. All your new data is saved in both your PC and over at Skype servers. Even if you delete the data from your PC, when you will login to Skype, the data in the Skype servers will be there.
The above process might not be automatic, but it is quite reliable. There are also some apps that will let you backup skype data, but they can be very unreliable, and most don’t even work due to Skype restrictions in newer versions.
If you have any questions or know any other reliable method to backup Skype chat, let us know in the comments below.
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