diff --git a/README.md b/README.md new file mode 100644 index 0000000..81c1937 --- /dev/null +++ b/README.md @@ -0,0 +1,58 @@ +# Telegram_Backup +Copyright 2016 Fabian Schlenz +Licensed under GPLv3 + +## Description +This is a small Java app that allows you to download all your history from +Telegram's servers and keep a local copy of them. + +## Features +* You can use multiple accounts with this tool. +* Messages are saved in a SQLite database; media (documents, photos, videos, + stickers, geolocations, audios) are downloaded and saved as files. +* A GUI is planned for later; at the moment this is a command line tool + only. +* Incremental backups - if you run the tool at a later time, it will only + download new messages / media. +* You will be able to use an HTML exporter to create static HTML files + containing your chats. This feature is still in the works. + +## Limitations +This tool relies on Telegram's API. Apparently they don't like people who +download lots of media files, so this app gets blocked after about 2000 +downloaded media files. This is nothing bad; the app detects this and waits +the necessary amount of time as dictated by Telegram. Since this delay can +be quite large (I've seen 50 minutes), downloading lots and lots of media +can take some time. + +But since this tool is designed to be able to continue it's work at any +time, you can just abort the download and continue it later - that way, +you'll be moving step by step towards a complete archive of your telegram +messages and media files. + +## Usage +You need to have at least Java 1.7 installed on your machine. Download the +jar file, and run it on the console like this: `java -jar telegram_backup.jar`. + +Append `--help` to get a list of all available commands. + +Basically, you have to call it with `--login` first to login to your telegram account and then +call it again with `--account ` to use this account and download all +it's history. If you have just one account, you can omit this parameter. + +## Donations +I've put quite some time into this tool. If you want to donate a small +amount, you can send it via Bitcoin to *1CofYzS88iEngxMu4NqQeohWDBUHv9CNDJ* or via PayPal to +[mail@fabianonline.de](https://paypal.me/fabianonline). + +Alternatively use [this link](http://www.amazon.com/?_encoding=UTF8&camp=1638&creative=6742&linkCode=ur2&site-redirect=de&tag=telegrambackup-21) the next time you shop at +amazon.com or [this +link](https://www.amazon.de/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&linkCode=ll2&tag=telegrambackup-21&linkId=c54d9fe7c560128c6f018dd24e80d486) for amazon.de. You won't +pay any more, but I will get a few percent of your purchase's worth from +amazon. + +## Attribution +This tool uses libraries from other developers which are covered by other licenses, +which are: +* [Kotlogram](https://github.com/badoualy/kotlogram) by Yannick Badoual, licensed under MIT License. +* [SQLite JDBC](https://bitbucket.org/xerial/sqlite-jdbc) by Taro L. Saito, licensed under Apache License version 2.0.