It amazes me that Skype chat history is only stored on your local machine
It’s just a simple sqlLite db file, located (on a mac at least) in
/Users/alex/Library/Application Support/Skype/<username>/main.db
Recently, I started fresh on my mac – fresh install of Mavericks, and re-installed all my apps
I had a TimeMachine backup anyway, in case I needed to either roll back, or get anything back –
And lucky I did.
While searching for a >6 month old Skype chat, I realised that the history had been totally wiped out.
Luckily, I came across Skyperious – http://suurjaak.github.io/Skyperious/
A handy little utility for viewing (and importantly in my case, merging) Skype DB files
I used TimeMachine to grab the latest (pre-wipe) version of my /Users/alex/Library/Application Support/Skype/alexjamesbrown/main.db file (which happened to be >30mb)
I then copied this to my desktop, calling it skypeold.db
Also, I copied my current main.db to desktop, calling it skypenew.db
Once these were in place, I used my Parallels VM (which I share home folders with) to install Skyperious – the setup steps for mac are numerous, where as there is a handy installer for Windows.
I browsed to the desktop, selected the skypeold.db, and merged with skypenew.db
This took a couple of seconds to merge, but when it was done, I renamed to main.db and overwrote the original file in /Users/alex/Library/Application Support/Skype/alexjamesbrown/
Signing back into Skype, all my old history is back