On: It's virtually impossible to read old iMessages an...

[forgotmypw17]

I've had this sort of experience with many systems, which is why I decided to use .txt files as the base data store for my current project.

It is indexed in a relational database, and it is presented in a Web 1.1 frontend, but it all flows back through the text files, and they are always available for download, optionally in zip or tar.gz archives.

[fomine3 → forgotmypw17]

Ironically SQLite is excellent choice in this situation.

[forgotmypw17 → fomine3]

SQLite is great, and I use it for caching and for providing data summaries... but it is not near-universally compatible and accessible, human-readable, the way text-files are.