telegram-json-backup

This script has been deprecated in favor of telegram-history-dump. Telegram-json-backup still works but it is no longer maintained.

Summary

Python script for telegram-cli that creates JSON Lines compliant dumps of Telegram message backlogs.

Support for downloading media files is available on the experimental branch (git checkout experimental). It changes the backup process significantly and may be unstable.

Updates

September 5th, 2015:

• Fix bug that produced duplicate JSON objects for the first chunk of messages in a dialog.
• Conform to JSON Lines recommendation of saving files as .jsonl.

September 4th, 2015:

• Prevent tgl crash when fetching dialog list containing chats with deleted user accounts.
• Prevent tgl crash when backing up group chat with messages from deleted user accounts.

Usage

1. Edit the script configuration at the top of json-backup.py
2. Run telegram-cli with the script: telegram-cli -Z json-backup.py

The output is one file per dialog (can be either user or group chat) with newline separated JSON objects representing messages/events. See the message and peer attribute descriptions in the telegram-cli Python readme for more information about the properties.

Because the message backlogs are received in chunks from newest to oldest, the arrival of new messages while the backup is running may break index consistency and therefore cause duplicate or missing messages in the resulting dump. I recommend running this at a time when it's unlikely that anyone will send a message to your backup target(s). You could even schedule the backup in the middle of the night with at or crontab.

Limitations

The script supports an unlimited backlog size and number of chats, but throttling is necessary to dump large (3000+ messages) backlogs. Unfortunately, the limit is not exactly known and exceeding it will just cause the callback to never arrive, effectively halting the backup operation without notice (tg#717). So if the script suddenly stops making progress this is probably the cause; restart the script after adjusting the parameters.

Dependencies

• Python 3 (make sure libpython3 is installed as well as the runtime before building tg)
• telegram-cli