How to export and backup your Google Hangouts chat history?
A very awesome guy called Jay2k1 has written a web tool you can use to view and download your Hangouts chat history. Whenever you need an export of your chat history, give it a try at https://hangoutparser.jay2k1.com
However, a major downside for me is the inability to export your chat. Sometimes you want to re-read some conversation you’ve had, or search for something the chat partner has said, like a link to a website. Now I am used to using IRC (Internet Relay Chat), which is kind of oldschool but – depending on the chat client configuration – can log everything to text files. You can read them, grep them, search for links, nicknames, everything. Log files of conversations are great.
Since I do not have Gmail, I can’t tell how accessible or not the chat history is in the Gmail web interface, but in the Chrome app, Android app and the chat box on the Google+ website, you can only see the last 50 or so messages. If you scroll up more than that, it dynamically loads more messages from the server. Then again, scroll up, and it will load some more. If you had a couple of long conversations, this can take quite a while, and even when you do this, the output produced by selecting all and copy pasting the chat to a text editor is ugly and not useful. So I googled how to export the chat. WhatsApp for example lets you send conversation histories via e-mail, which is great. It seems, however, that Hangouts cannot do this – there is no export/archive function whatsoever.
You should also follow him on his blog at https://blog.jay2k1.com You will find very useful posts from time to time :)
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