Telecrawl

Use this for Telegram history questions. Local archive first; the Telegram apps only for live/current state.

Sources

DB: ~/.telecrawl/telecrawl.db
Import source: Telegram Desktop tdata or native macOS Telegram Postbox (auto-detected)
CLI: telecrawl
Archive host: the populated archive currently lives on clawmac (~200 chats). Local DBs on other Macs may be empty — check status first and prefer SSH to the archive host over answering from an empty DB:

ssh -o RequestTTY=no -o RemoteCommand=none steipete@clawmac 'zsh -lc "telecrawl --json status"'

Freshness

telecrawl --json status

Empty counts mean no import has run on this machine, not "no Telegram data".

Queries

All read commands take --json.

telecrawl --json chats --limit 20
telecrawl --json chats --unread
telecrawl --json messages --chat <ID> --limit 50 --after 2026-01-01
telecrawl --json search "query" [--chat ID]
telecrawl --json contacts --limit 50
telecrawl --json folders
telecrawl --json topics --chat <ID>

Import / Refresh

telecrawl doctor                 # verify a Telegram data source is readable
telecrawl import                 # merge-import from detected local Telegram app
telecrawl import --fetch-media   # also pull Telegram cloud media

Imports merge by default; --restore replaces the archive — treat as destructive and confirm first.

Backup

Encrypted age shards to a git repo:

telecrawl backup status
telecrawl backup push