Copyright 2016 Fabian Schlenz
Licensed under GPLv3
This is a small Java app that allows you to download all your history from Telegram's servers and keep a local copy of them.
You can find the whole app packed into one fat jar file under releases.
- You can use multiple accounts with this tool.
- Messages are saved in a SQLite database; media (documents, photos, videos, stickers, geolocations, audios) are downloaded and saved as files.
- A GUI is planned for later; at the moment this is a command line tool only.
- Incremental backups - if you run the tool at a later time, it will only download new messages / media.
- You will be able to use an HTML exporter to create static HTML files containing your chats. This feature is still in the works.
This tool relies on Telegram's API. They started rate limiting the calls made by this tool some time ago. As of february 2017, downloading messages is limited to 400 messages every 30 seconds, resulting in 48,000 messages per hour. Media download is not throttled right now, so it should be a lot quicker.
But since this tool is designed to be able to continue it's work at any time, you can just abort the download and continue it later - that way, you'll be moving step by step towards a complete archive of your telegram messages and media files.
You need to have at least Java 1.7 installed on your machine. Download the
jar file, and run it on the console like this: java -jar telegram_backup.jar.
Append --help to get a list of all available commands.
Basically, you have to call it with --login first to login to your telegram account and then
call it again with --account <phone> to use this account and download all
it's history. If you have just one account, you can omit this parameter.
I've put quite some time into this tool. If you want to donate a small amount, you can send it via Bitcoin to 1CofYzS88iEngxMu4NqQeohWDBUHv9CNDJ or via PayPal to [email protected].
Alternatively use this link the next time you shop at amazon.com or this link for amazon.de. You won't pay any more, but I will get a few percent of your purchase's worth from amazon.
The library I'm using to access Telegram has some small bugs. One of those is the display of meaningless (because they are being acted accordingly upon) error messages. Those include:
Exception in thread "pool-x-thread-y" java.lang.Error: java.nio.channels.ClosedChannelException- Something containing
AUTH_ERRORYou can just ignore these messages.
Basically, if the tool is continuing to run after error messages are shown, you can just ignore the messages. Either way, even if Telegram_Backup would "miss" some files or messages, this will be detected at the next run of this program and then tried again.
The files are being saved in your User directory in a folder named
telegram_backup. Under windows, this would typically be under
C:\Users\<username>\telegram_backup. Linux users should look unter
/home/<username>/telegram_backup.
You can change this directory by supplying --target <dir> when calling
Telegram_Backup.
In the folder telegram_backup is one folder named stickers, which will
hold all sticker images you've received. Then there is a folder for each
account, named after the phone number associated with that account.
In these folders you will find auth.dat and dc.dat, which contain
authentication data. There is database.sqlite which is a SQLite3 database
containing all your messages and other data. The folder files contains all
media files, named after the ID of the message they belong to. Last but not
least the folder export contains exported data.
This tool uses libraries from other developers which are covered by other licenses, which are:
- Kotlogram by Yannick Badoual, licensed under MIT License.
- SQLite JDBC by Taro L. Saito, licensed under Apache License version 2.0.
- Mustache.java by RightTime, Inc., licensed under Apache License version 2.0.
- Logback by QOS.ch, licensed unter LGPL version 2.1.
- SLF4J by QOS.ch, licensed under MIT license.