Migrating from Skype 4.2 to 4.3 on Ubuntu

I have a lot of history in Skype v 4.2, but now it is deprecated cause of "cloud" conversations in new Skype versions. Now I installed Skype 4.3.0.37-1 on Ubuntu 14.04 (and my co-worker on his Debian 7) and I wondered I loss all history before 20th may 2014. How can I to integrate old history (I backuped ~/.Skype folder) to new Skype?

Solution 1:

You can try merging two databases with Skyperious.

Now, Skype might refuse to start due to malformed old messages. Open terminal, intall sqlite3 if necessary and:

sqlite3 ~/.Skype/[username]/main.db
> UPDATE Messages SET body_xml=substr(body_xml,instr(body_xml,'<files')) WHERE type=68 AND body_xml LIKE 'posted%';
> UPDATE Messages SET body_xml=substr(body_xml,instr(body_xml,'<files')) WHERE type=68 AND body_xml LIKE 'sent file%';
> .quit

If it still does not start (very likely if you are using non-English version of Skype), you can try running following query in sqlite3 and look through results to find other types of entries worth fixing:

SELECT Messages SET body_xml=substr(body_xml,instr(body_xml,'<files')) WHERE type=68