Once upon a time, there was a fabulous service called FogBugz. Well, technically it still exists, but over the past many years, since it was sold off by Fog Creek Software, it has both stagnated and diminished in reliability as a substantial number of us long-time users has grudgingly continued to use it.

Several months ago, the whiff of abandonment became too great for me to bear any longer, so I devised a plan to migrate my data out of FogBugz, and into more reliably maintained services. FogBugz effectively served as both a customer-service database, and a bug-tracking system. Most apps don’t strive to achieve this, so I had to plan for two new services to fill the shoes of this app. I settled on HelpScout for customer service, and GitHub Issues for bug-tracking. HelpScout has turned out to be more of a solid home run than GitHub issues, but I’m happy with both.

Whether you’re also looking to transition away from FogBugz, or just want a reliable means of backing up your data, you’ll need to use the FogBugz API to get your data out. Once you have a structured backup of all your case data and attachments, you’ll be in a good position to evaluate how you might migrate that data into a format that is suitable for importing to another service.

I’ve shared a pair of simple Python scripts on GitHub that will help you to automate dumping your FogBugz data. Simply download my dumpbugz files from GitHub, follow the directions in the README, and you should be left with a “Cases” folder that includes all of your data and attachments.

For my transition to HelpScout and GitHub Issues, I wrote additional scripts to interface with the APIs of those services. Those are not ready for sharing at this point, but I may share them in the future. In any case, I hope the scripts make it easier for you to “Dump FogBugz” sooner than later.