/rim/ noun
a large quantity of written matter

ream is a tool that lets you easily export all of your important Telegram chats.

It is a standalone re-implementation of Telegram Desktop's export functionality. The output from ream must be fully equivalent to the output from Telgram Desktop, and any difference in the resulting json (except for filenames) is treated as a bug.

• Install uv
• Clone this repository

First, you have to follow this instruction to obtain Telegram API credentials.

To run ream, you must create a configuration file named ream.toml with the following contents:

[api] # Your API credentials app_id = 123456 app_hash = "abcdefg01234" [export] max_file_size = 5000000000 # Max size for files to be downloaded chats = [ 123456, 7891234 ] # A list of chat ids to download path = "exports" # A directory in which your chat exports will be saved batch_size = 100 # How many messages to download at once. Higher values make # the export faster, but increase the risk of getting rate # limited. [ream] log_level = "ERROR" # Optional: log level for the application, defaults to INFO

uv run ream.py

The first time you run the program, It'll ask you to enter your phone number and login code.

ream may throw an error after you log in. If that happens, you need to confirm the data export request that you got on your Telgram account, and try running ream again.

Incremental exports are supported, which means that ream will only export messages that aren't already present in the export.json file for a given chat. You can run ream as a scheduled job without having to deal with duplicate data.

After updating ream, it's recommended to run migrations to update your exports to the latest format version, in case there have been any changes.

uv run migrate.py