Migrating Yahoo messenger chat archives manually

One thing that the Yahoo messenger program is missing is the ability to import or export chat archives. This can become fairly important if you have a lot of people in your buddy list, as I do over 700. The problem manifests itself when you do a full reinstallation of your Windows operating system, as may sometimes be required. Or if you are migrating from, say, Windows Vista to Windows 7, you may not want to do the in-place upgrade, but instead to a "fresh" install of the OS.

In this example, the system was previously running Windows Vista 32 bits. The archive files were located in :

C:\Windows.old\Users\atoy\Local Settings\VirtualStore\Program Files\Yahoo!\Messenger\Profiles\atoyccb\Archive\Messages

A new OS, Vista 64 bits, was installed. The new archived messages are now in

C:\Users\Charito\AppData\Local\VirtualStore\Program Files (x86)\Yahoo!\Messenger\Profiles\atoyccb\Archive\Messages

You can copy the old archives over by following the following steps :

• Open a command-prompt window as administrator
  
• Copy over the old archives to the new location :
  
  
  

  XCOPY "C:\Windows.old\Users\atoy\Local Settings\VirtualStore\Program Files\Yahoo!\Messenger\Profiles\atoyccb\Archive\Messages\*.*" ">C:\Users\Charito\AppData\Local\VirtualStore\Program Files (x86)\Yahoo!\Messenger\Profiles\atoyccb\Archive\Messages" /S