Transferring your Skype settings to another computer

I installed Skype on my new computer and found that my contact list is empty. So...this means Skype keeps my contact list locally instead of keeping it on the central server like MSN Messenger does.
I wanted to transfer all my Skype contacts from my old computer to the new one. It would be nice if Skype provided a Contact List Export/Import feature, but until then, I found this simple hack on their support forum that did just what was needed:

  1. On your old computer, go to the "%USERPROFILE%\Application Data\Skype folder. There you should see a folder with your Skype ID as the name.
  2. Copy that entire folder to your new computer, under the same location. Make sure you shut down Skype before copying, otherwise you'll get some sharing violations.
  3. Start up Skype on the new computer. You may be asked to enter your login information again.
  4. After logging in, you may see that your contact list is empty. Don't panic! Just restart Skype. This time you should see your full "imported" contact list.

The above procedure not only imported the contact list, but also the chat history, call history, the works.

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

Nice instructions. The biggest pain to a geeky Skype user is moving around his contact list. If you move around between a notebook and desktop or reinstall the OS a lot, it's great. Too bad it doesn't work if you want to migrate the contacts to a Linux or Mac box.

- steven ng

Thanh Hai Tran said...

Hey, Thanks for visiting. If you do find the instructions for the MAC and Linux platforms, please please, do post. ;-)
Cheers,

Unknown said...

For a Mac the folder to transfer can be found in the 'library/application support/skype/ folder. The folder carries your skype name. Transfer it to the same place on your new computer.

Thanh Hai Tran said...

Thanks, Dirk.

Keane said...

Hi - thanks for the post.. Just curious, and also something I would really want to know - does the process that you did also transfer conversation groups? thanks..

th2tran said...

@Keane: Sorry for the late reply. I wrote this process years ago when conversation groups did not exist yet. I'm not using Skype very often these days so I can't verify it for you. Again, sorry. :)

Unknown said...

Hey really awesome post and unique content . i like it. good work keep it up .. visit- Skype support.