I just ran Chatty and all of my (sms) chats of the last two months have disappeared. It just says ‘Start Chatting’…
How the f**k did that happen?!
Is this reversible?
Has anyone else encountered this problem?
I have been using mobile phones and sms for about 25 years now, but I have never seen this happen before. I hope it will correct iself somehow.
But it is kind of worrying, to say the least.
I did have this happen a while back. I don’t remember if it solved itself after a reboot or I just accepted the loss because I hadn’t don’t much messaging yet.
I do see that my xmpp messages disappear then reappear periodically and just assumed that the connection to the server dropped and during those times the account disappears which is different than all other chat applications I’ve ever dealt with… but seems to be what’s happening.
I did a reboot, but it did not bring back the sms-history. Hopefully it is a temporary glitch.
Do they still exist here?
/home/purism/.purple/chatty/db/chatty-history.db
I don’t have a sql viewer, so I can’t tell what is in the file. Its 90kb in size, I can see that. Is that enough for two months worth of sms’s? Seems a bit small, maybe.
Could I use Chatty to open the db? (I can pick it from the list.)
That should work.
Doesn’t open. Still only the ‘Start Chatting’ message.
That is not good news. I did nothing to cause this - I am pretty sure about that.
So what is being unreliable here? Chatty or the L5?
Somehow the chatty folder and everything in it changed (or at least got a date stamp) around two o’clock (Amsterdam time) this afternoon.
I think I wasn’t even near the phone at that time.
If you want to verify that your message history is still there while you’re running down the problem with chatty, you could sftp into the L5, right click on the .db file, and open it with, e.g., DB Browser for SQLite or similar. That should be available in whichever repo you can use on your computer.
By the way, did you check under “Archived” in Chatty? Maybe you accidentally archived everything, which would remove them from the main view. 
EDIT: You can actually install DB Browser for SQLite directly on the L5, and it works well enough for you to verify if your messages are still there, although it doesn’t fit the screen very well.
The importance of taking any kind of backup. Either files even or just partition/disc images.
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No archives.
I have never lost an sms in over 25 years of using a mobile phone, because it ‘just’ disappeared from my phone. Never had the need for making s backup of my sms’s - except when moving from one phone to the other.
There wasn’t that much to back just yet anyway.
But, that’s not the point. It is the fact that sms’s hsve gone missing at all.
Never seen that happen before.
I am gobsmacked, and highly disconcerted. I can’t have my phone just loosing messages every now and then.
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I wil not go through the trouble of reading the db: the sms db is smaller than the matrix.db - which should be pretty much empty.
purism@pureos:~$ sqlite3 /home/purism/.purple/chatty/db/chatty-history.db
SQLite version 3.34.1 2021-01-20 14:10:07
Enter ".help" for usage hints.
sqlite>
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Thanks. How can I view the content of the database? I never worked with sqlite.
.help
.tables
SELECT * from messages;
...
seems empty…