Periodic, recurring exporting?

[rors]

Hello. This looks like a fantastic piece of software. I did a trial that worked perfectly.

My goal is to periodically export all my iMessage content from my phone to my laptop (say, for example, once per year) and delete it off my iPhone. One thing I cannot figure out is whether this app can merge each export into one large export, or whether I would need to have multiple archives of iMessage content, one per export.

Apologies if I've missed something. From reading docs, the FAQ, and code, I can't seem to figure out if this feature is supported. If not, anyone have any suggestions for how one might address this use case?

Thanks!

[ReagentX]

Merging is not supported.

[rors]

Thanks for the quick response.

Any chance this might be a feature that you'd consider adding in the future?

Or if I was interested in adding it, do you foresee any pitfalls that might make it tricky to implement?

My impression is that my use case above would be a common one and this would be a popular feature, but maybe I'm misunderstanding the intended typical workflow?

Thanks again.

[ethanbarclay]

I am also in search of a tool for the same use case (and so is #580, #338, #252?).

I actually tried making my own implementation for this a few months back on a fork by scanning existing export files for the last message timestamp, then only querying newer messages and appending them.

But parsing timestamps back from HTML, converting to iMessage's internal format, and handling deduplication correctly has a lot of edge cases and I don't really trust my own code enough to use it for important backups (even though it appeared to work). Would love to see something like this supported natively.