Hi all,
I am looking to move to my Librem 5 full time. Does anyone have any advice regarding how to export SMS from the Messages app in Android in a format to be imported into Chatty.
Ultimately I need too be able to have the basics setup on the Librem 5 and reliably back it up so I can reflash in the future to take example of disk encryption as an example. Open to any advice from other users.
Thanks
Just for exporting from Android, I use https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.riteshsahu.SMSBackupRestore - it creates an XML file, although I have no idea whether the format it produces can be imported into Chatty, or if there is even a standardized format for such things.
Thanks for the response
I moved my wife’s phone from an old android with a slider to a jitterbug. I had her write every contact with pencil and paper.
Turned out to be a good idea. At least the jitterbug folks had a browser screen to perform contact data entry on a PC from those papers.
I don’t see any setting for importing existing chats. Presumably, chats within Chatty are stored somewhere in the file system. I wonder if you could just append an exported batch to the stored chats on the L5?
Edit: Or could Thunderbird (on your computer) have the ability to import the Android chat file, which would then be available in Geary on the L5…although still not available in Chatty)?
Or, if the Android chats can be imported into another XMPP account, Chatty does have the ability to add an additional XMPP account.
In F-Droid, I see a couple of apps for SMS/MMS/calls export to IMAP: SMS Backup+ and SMS Gate
The OP was actually asking about importing the content of SMS/MMS conversations, not the contacts. Importing Contacts on the Librem 5 works well.
Depends what you mean by “in the file system”. They may be in an e.g. SQLite database.
I took the approach that: I just don’t need to haul over all sorts of ancient conversations i.e. I did not address this problem - and took it as an opportunity to do some housecleaning. 
However if there is a text message that contains some critically useful info, it may be that you can use cut&paste to email it to yourself (and thereby to the Librem 5). If it’s an image with critically useful info then it comes down to the more general problem of migrating images from the old phone to … somewhere.
Found 'em! The messages are in:
home/.purple/logs/mm-sms/sms/a-folder-for-each-contact/an-html-for-each-message
There is also home/.purple/chatty/db/chatty-history.db
and:
home/.purple/certificates/x509/tls_peers/
I’m not sure how one would integrate an imported chat history, unless each imported message is it’s own .html, as above, also.
And there are a few .xml docs within home/.purple:
accounts.xml
blist.xml
prefs.xml
status.xml
Maybe: an-html-for-each-date
An SQLite file and the text of SMSs is in there too.
So overall looks painful to import without documentation and/or API.
No, it’s each message. Just checked again.
Yes. Maybe a transitional chat program could accept the Android SMS export, and then export the messages again in a usable form for the L5… I imagine there’s a high probability of ending up with one long SMS containing all chats.
Or, there’s IMAP, as noted above.
Like you, I don’t have this problem, because I regularly delete all my SMS and MMS, saving the bits that I want to keep.
Best would be if Chatty got an upgrade that includes chat import and export functions.
@amarok I would have guessed that putting them into the SQLite DB should be enough and that the text files (as the folder name implies) are only logs which should maybe be deactivated in the production application.
Just a wild guess but that makes more sense in my mind.
Then that is an additional complication because mine are definitely combined, with more than one message in a file.
Icky HTML files too i.e. not valid XML / HTML.
