My telegram bot had many users but I lost their data when my hosting company wiped the database. This happened because I missed a payment and they deleted everything after a week. Now I need to figure out if there’s any way to get back the list of people who interacted with my bot.
The situation is:
- Bot was working and people were using it
- Hosting service removed all data due to payment issues
- I need to recover the user information somehow
Is there any method to retrieve this data? Maybe telegram stores some interaction history or there’s another approach I haven’t thought of? I’m really stuck on this problem and would appreciate any suggestions.
Nope, Telegram’s Bot API won’t help you here. They don’t keep any user interaction history you can pull after losing your database - it’s designed for privacy, so that data doesn’t stick around on their servers. Check if you had any monitoring tools running though. Sentry or basic server monitoring sometimes captures request data with chat IDs. Same goes for analytics services like Mixpanel - they might’ve grabbed some user interaction data. Your best bet might be going back to wherever you originally promoted the bot. Hit up those social media posts, websites, or communities where you first shared it. Yeah, it’s manual work, but sometimes that’s all you’ve got when backups fail.
yeah, telegram doesn’t really keep a backup of bot user lists. maybe look for some old backups or see if your host offers data recovery. also, try messaging users on other channels and get them to start the bot again.
Nope, there’s no way to recover user lists through Telegram’s API once your database is toast. Your bot token lets you message users who’ve talked to your bot before, but you need their chat IDs stored somewhere first.
Here’s what I’d try: dig through any old log files on your local machine or dev environment. Sometimes debug logs accidentally capture chat IDs. Check if you were using analytics services or webhook logs too - they might have user data traces.
Going forward, set up automated daily backups to Google Drive or Dropbox. I learned this the hard way when the same thing happened to one of my projects.