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No one is talking of chat logs. My Skype logs with my brother are incredibly important and go back several years as we live on separate continents but pretty close nonetheless. This would be horrible -- if I hadn't switched to Windows 10 thanks to Windows Subsystem for Linux. If you do the same, here's how I set up, hopefully helpful to converts like me: https://github.com/chx/chx.github.io/wiki/How-I-set-up-my-Wi...

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The old Skype for Linux app stores its logs as a simple sqlite database from which you can export them fairly straightforwardly, see e.g. https://pastebin.com/bWXCQK83 for a simple script which brings them into Pidgin's log format.

But do you really need them? I also swear by keeping all my chat logs, and would get very upset if I lost my WhatsApp / iMessage conversations, however on the other hand I cannot recall a single instance where I needed to find something that was older than a week.

As claudius mentions, it's a simple SQLite database and yes I do search it, every 2-3 months we need some nugget from years and years ago.

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