Tweaking mort's fork of the Tweaking Guillermo's original script to add support for accounts with a huge amount of tweets ;), to use the new twitter api.

twitter_backup.rb

#!/usr/bin/env ruby
=begin

DESCRIPTION
This little program will save all tweets from a user timelime to files
~/.twitter_backup/tweets/tweet_id.yaml # Full yaml tweet
~/.twitter_backup/tweets/tweet_id.txt  # Only tweet text


You can search your tweets with:

cat ~/.twitter_backup/tweets/*.txt | grep -i 'some text'

or

grep -rin "keyword" ~/.twitter_backup/tweets/*.txt


INSTALL
$ chmod +x ./twitter_backup.rb

EXECUTION
$ ./twitter_backup.rb user_name

FROM RUBY
TwitterBackup.new(user).backup!

NOTES
To get higher rate limit, set this values and move to the code section. :-P

Twitter.configure do |config|
  config.consumer_key = ""
  config.consumer_secret = ""
  config.oauth_token = ""
  config.oauth_token_secret = ""
end

=end

require 'rubygems'
require 'twitter'

class TwitterBackup

  def initialize(user)
    @user = user
  end

  def total
    Twitter.user(@user).statuses
  end

  def remaining_hits
    Twitter.rate_limit_status.remaining_hits
  end

  def backup!
    puts "Backing up #{total} tweets for #{@user}"
    mkdir
    page = start_page.to_i
    begin
      puts "Fetching page #{page}"
      begin
        res = Twitter.user_timeline(@user, :count => 200, :trim_user => true, :page => page)
      rescue Twitter::Error => e
        puts "Twitter API exception: #{e.message}"
        save_latest_page(page)
        if(e.retry_after == 0)
          puts "Retrying"
        else
          puts "Retrying after #{e.retry_after} seconds"
          sleep e.retry_after
        end
        retry
      end
      res.each do |tweet|
        puts "Processing tweet #{tweet.id}: #{tweet.text}"
        save(tweet)
      end
      page += 1
    end while (res.size > 0)
  ensure
    save_latest_page(page)
  end

private

  def save(tweet)
    write_yaml(tweet.id,tweet)
    write_txt(tweet.id,tweet.text)
  end

  def save_latest_page(page)
    f = File.open(backup_dir+"/.latest_page",'w')
    f.write page
    f.close
  end

  def start_page
    f_path = backup_dir+"/.latest_page"

    n = if File.exists?(f_path)
      f = File.open(f_path, 'r')
      v = f.readline
      f.close
      File.unlink(f_path)
      v
    else
      1
    end

    n
  end

  def write_yaml(id,data)
    f = File.open(backup_dir+"/#{id.to_s}.yaml",'w')
    f.write data.to_yaml
    f.close
  end

  def write_txt(id,data)
    f = File.open(backup_dir+"/#{id.to_s}.txt",'w')
    f.write data.to_yaml
    f.close
  end

  def backup_dir
    File.expand_path("~/.twitter_backup/tweets")
  end

  def mkdir
    `mkdir -p #{backup_dir}`
  end
end


if $0 == __FILE__
  TwitterBackup.new(ARGV.join(" ")).backup!
end