Michał Kazimierz Kowalczyk

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Import your Skype account data on MacOS


There are moments in your life, when you want to start everything once again... One of them is called an installation of your MacOS on new Hard Drive Disk. You can use Migration Assistant to help you import lot of things, but... if you don't want to use it, you'll find recovering your personal Skype data (chat histories, contacts, favorites etc.) really hard.

I found at this website: https://support.skype.com/en/faq/FA181/how-do-i-back-up-my-contact-list-on-mac-os-x an information that the Skype data are stored in:

/Users/---your-account-name---/Library/Application Support/Skype

Unfortunately this guide is not up-to-date (as well for my operating system: Mountain Lion (10.8.2) as for my Skype 6 (6.0.0.2968)). In my case, to achieve my goal, I needed to replace the file main.db (which is placed in a directory named by my Skype identifier) by equivalent file from a copy of my files. Below I present a simple guide how to do it.

On newer version of MacOS Library directory is hidden, so I suggest to use Terminal (Application/Utilities/Terminal) to access it.

First, get root privileges. Type in the Terminal:

sudo su

Then type your administrator password. You should see something like this:

sh-3.2#

Now, go to Library/Application Support:

cd /Users/---your-user-account-name---/Library/Application\ Support/

If you didn't run Skype yet, there will be no Skype directory in Application Support (you can check it by typing "ls"). When you'll run Skype, you'll be sure that Skype direcory exists. You can get into it by typing: 

cd Skype

Now, if you did log in on your Skype account and type "ls", you'll see directory named by your Skype identifier. If you don't see it, it means that you didn't logged in on Skype on your account. After you'll do it, quit Skype application and get into that directory:

cd ---your_skype_identifier---

Now, type "ls -l". This will show you list of files inside this directory. To import your data you need to simply replace the file "main.db" with equivalent file from your user data copy. You can do it by:

cp ---path-to-copy-of-Users-directory---/---your-user-account-name---/Library/Skype/---your-skype-identifier---/main.db main.db

The last thing that you can do is change the owner of new copy of main.db file. Type:

chown ---your-user-acount-name---:stuff main.db

Now, after you run Skype and log into your account, you should get all the personal data from your copy. (-:

MKK

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