The project is abandoned

It uses the old VK API, which doesn't work since 2017. Later, in 2019, the messages API was restricted (due to privacy reasons): https://vk.com/dev/messages_api

The author lost his interest in performing backups of his VK chats. The script will not be fixed.

Please, file an issue or send a pull request if you know a maintained tools for fetching chats from VK -- I'll add links here.

About

The script for locally saving and incremental updating private and groupchat messages from social service vk.com.

Requirements

• python 3
• requests

How to use

Configure and first run:

• Open this link in a browser and confirm permissions for the 'messages backup' application, in fact that is just obtaining an access token with certain rights.
• Copy access_token and user_id values from URL in an address bar and put it to the config.json file, use config.json.example as the format reference.
• Run ./vk_messages_backup.py.

The script will generate storage directory with json dump of gotten data and chatlogs directory with formatted chat logs (both in a current working directory).

Incremental update:

• Rerun ./vk_messages_backup.py in the same directory as before.

Details

The script used straightforward approaches and algorithms, so don't wonder if it consume lots or memory and CPU time for processing and formatting the messages’ dump. The processing of some corner cases are not implemented properly.

License

Public domain. You free to use it as you need without any restrictions. No guarantees provided.