How to recover old skype messages?

[paulyjames]

I use skype and im trying to look at old conversations i have with a specific user. I want to go back 2 years or so but it seem to only go back 14 months. Is there a way i can view my old conversations all the way back there or even before that?


I read online that you go to run and type in %appdata%/skype


Then find your username for skype and click on it


Then find the main.db folder.


I do see something called main and it seem to be big file.



It say its a db file and editing or modifying them could damage your system.


When i click it, it shows programs i could open with it such as


adobe
notepad
wordpad etc



Can someone tell me what im suppose to do? And is it safe since i got that message?
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[Gawskert]

Can Skype allow you to do that? no !!!

 

[Alejandro85]

You're almost there. The main.db file is where all chats are stored locally and it's where Skype pulls them from. You can attempt to scroll to old enough dates with the normal Skype chat window, but newer versions of it became more and more broken and may give problems as you noted.

Reading the mains.db file with notepad is of course doomed to failure as it just opens plain text files (and it's really a SQLite file). Use a dedicated viewer instead:
Skype Logs Reader/Viewer (.dbb and main.db files)

Make sure to make a backup of the mains.db file if you really like to have past chats safe.