Wire - Backup Conversations - Plain Text
80aff123-9163-4f3e-a93d-4a2f35af9be1 opened this issue · 3 comments
- [ x] I have seen https://docs.wire.com/ and https://github.com/wireapp/wire-server-deploy - the documentation there does not answer my question.
My question:
Hi,
It looks like the only way to see my backed up conversations is by importing the Wire-ccao001-Backup_2020-09-03.desktop_wbu file into another wire client.
I would like to get a plain text back up of all my conversations.
Is there currently a way to do that or are backups tied to the wire platform?
Thank you!
- Carla
Hey @ccao001,
From the wire-server perspective, it is impossible to serve content of the conversations as it is all end to end encrypted.
The clients officially do not support plain text exports. But there is a hack you can use. Of course we don't promise any guarantees of it working now or in the future. The desktop_wbu file is just a zip archive. If you just unzip it, you will find all the conversation data in some JSON files.
@ccao001 here is a little script on the wire-desktop backups before to get them in a bit more useful output. It will group all the messages per conversation, and sort them by chronological time.
Again I can't guarantee this to be stable; but if this is just for you to get it in a format that is useful for you outside of Wire once I think it suffices :)
unzip <desktop_wbu file>
cat events.json | jq '. | group_by(.conversation) | map (sort_by(.time))' > events_per_conversation.json
I hope the above helps you. I'm going to close this now; as backup formats and clients do not really have anything to do with the backend and thus is not actionable for us. Feel free to leave additional questions here though.