Limited history being exported

[SDH94]

I'm on Windows 11, and I've just run your code in PowerShell (using python -m sigexport.main ~/signal-chats) to extract my signal chat history, after using the Docker installation method.

However, it has only exported history going back about 5 months, whereas my chat history goes back well over a year.

Is this a bug, and is there currently any way to extract the entire chat history duration?

Thanks very much in advance! Sorry if this has been addressed elsewhere, I am very non-tech-savvy and took quite a while to even get the ~5 months of messages out.

[carderne]

Does it go back well over a year on Signal Desktop as well? The history will only go back to when you first used Signal Desktop...

This is very unlikely to be a bug and probably not something I can help with.

Closing under that assumption, but please re-open if you think I'm wrong!

[distbit0]

Hey @carderne I just ran signal-export in docker mode on my fedora system. For the chat I am interested in, which has several months worth of history on my desktop signal-desktop client, the corresponding chat.md file only contains around 12 messages, all from near when the group was created, despite there being thousands of messages in the chat's history.

[distbit0]

I also just re-ran the command and explicitly passed in my signal source directory /home//.config/Signal and the issue persists.

[carderne]

The only solution here is going to be for you to open an interactive session connected to your database and see what's going on with the data. There is no code in signal-export that would do this, but maybe some of the chats are stored differently or something's been renamed, I have no idea.

[huyz]

I myself prefer to run signal-export under the Python debugger (e.g. IntelliJ, PyCharm) to see what's going on.