Database on external drive?

[Meatwad650]

I'm getting the following:

john@jarvis% imessage-exporter -f html -c full -p /Volumes/home/imessage-backup/Messages/chat.db -r /Volumes/home/imessage-backup/Messages/Attachments -o /Volumes/home/imessage-backup/Export
Building cache...
  [1/5] Caching chats...
Invalid configuration: Failed to query table: unable to open database file

The weird thing is this works fine on local disk. I moved this all to a network volume to save space. I do own the files:

john@jarvis Messages % whoami
john
john@jarvis Messages % ls -la
total 256936
drwxrwxrwx@ 1 john  staff        670 Dec 23 14:52 .
drwxrwxrwx@ 1 john  staff        264 Dec 25 17:14 ..
drwxrwxrwx@ 1 john  staff       8728 May 18  2024 Attachments
drwxrwxrwx@ 1 john  staff        264 Jun 15  2024 Caches
drwxrwxrwx@ 1 john  staff        264 Dec 12  2020 CloudKitMetaData
drwxrwxrwx@ 1 john  staff        264 Oct  8  2024 CollaborationNoticeCache
drwxrwxrwx@ 1 john  staff        264 Dec 23 19:02 Drafts
-rw-rw-rw-@ 1 john  staff      69632 Dec 25 17:05 LiteSegmentStore.db
-rw-rw-rw-@ 1 john  staff      32768 Dec 25 17:05 LiteSegmentStore.db-shm
-rw-rw-rw-@ 1 john  staff     782832 Dec 25 17:05 LiteSegmentStore.db-wal
drwxrwxrwx@ 1 john  staff       2438 Dec 23 09:10 NickNameCache
drwxrwxrwx@ 1 john  staff        568 Sep 21 07:43 StickerCache
drwxrwxrwx@ 1 john  staff        264 Nov 17 11:17 Sync
-rw-rw-rw-@ 1 john  staff  121688064 Dec 25 17:05 chat.db
-rw-rw-rw-@ 1 john  staff     262144 Dec 25 17:05 chat.db-shm
-rw-rw-rw-@ 1 john  staff    1759272 Dec 25 17:05 chat.db-wal
-rw-rw-rw-@ 1 john  staff    6838394 Dec 25 17:05 com.apple.messages.geometrycache_v15.plist
-rw-rw-rw-@ 1 john  staff        832 Dec 25 17:05 com.apple.messages.group-blacklist.plist
-rw-rw-rw-@ 1 john  staff      32768 Dec 25 17:05 prewarm.db
-rw-rw-rw-@ 1 john  staff      32768 Dec 25 17:05 prewarm.db-shm
-rw-rw-rw-@ 1 john  staff      12392 Dec 25 17:05 prewarm.db-wal

Any hints? It doesn't seem that different from the example:

imessage-exporter -f html -c clone -p /Volumes/external/chat.db -r /Volumes/external/Attachments -o /Volumes/external/export 

[ReagentX]

I agree with you that the command looks correct. Are you able to run diagnostics against the file with imessage-exporter -d -p /Volumes/home/imessage-backup/Messages/chat.db?

If that doesn't work, you can try connecting to it directly and checking if you are able to query it manually using sqlite3 /Volumes/home/imessage-backup/Messages/chat.db and then running a query like "SELECT * FROM chat;".

[Meatwad650]

I played with it. The issue is (and I didn't know this, but do now) that sql REALLY doesn't like network shares, SMB or AFP. BUT, if you create a .sparsebundle, store THAT on your NAS, and then mount that...everything works fine.

Wacky.