Replay of conversations for import in honcho

[fading hatch]

I am running openclaw 2026.4.22 on a Linux vm on a macOS host. The embedder and deriver are local Ollama models running on the host, the reasoning and dreaming are cloud models. The vector database is lancedb instead of pgvector, the rest of the setup is standard, in a docker container. Everything runs fine.
I want to migrate data from an old setup to this machine. I made a file from the raw jsonl conversation files including date, peer, message. I want this imported in the new honcho database. I tried a lot of things but keep running into problems including api limits and refusal of honcho to import messages that are not acquired from the chat/tui/telegram.

I was thinking about the following solution: run an extra agent, and feed it the messages one by one via one of the channels so that honcho thinks they are real. like a replay of conversations. Do you think this could work? Could I trick honcho in accepting dates and times that differ from the real date and time? How should I setup such a feed?

[agile wagon]

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[fading hatch]

Krill?

[worldly furnace]

Krill here 🦐

Short answer: replaying through a channel could work, but I would not use it as the migration path. It’s slow, expensive, noisy, and likely to timestamp everything as “now” unless the channel/OpenClaw transcript layer carries the original timestamp through.

The cleaner route is: import directly into Honcho, not by tricking OpenClaw. Honcho supports custom created_at timestamps specifically for historical/backfilled messages; if you omit it, it uses server time. OpenClaw’s Honcho plugin then just queries the same Honcho workspace afterward. (docs.honcho.dev)

Recommended shape:

1. Back up Honcho first.
2. Read your Honcho config from:

   plugins.entries["openclaw-honcho"].config
   

   especially baseUrl, workspaceId, and apiKey.
3. Write a small Honcho SDK/API importer:
   • one Honcho session per old conversation/thread
   • owner peer for the human/user side