Please Help. N900 died :-(. How can I access contacts on my Backup?
 

Hi guys,

my beloved N900 just died and I urgently need to access some phone numbers. I have a backup on my SD card, but how can I restore it without a phone? Ovi Suite seems to need a phone. I really need a number from there. Please help, any advise is appreciated.

Sad greetings,
Ste

Re: Please Help. N900 died :-(. How can I access contacts on my Backup?
 

have you tried reflashing your N900 ?

Re: Please Help. N900 died :-(. How can I access contacts on my Backup?
 

Hi Mautz,

yes, without success. The phone is completely dead. No reaction if I connect it via USB. Do you have an idea, how I can read the contents of my backup from my pc (windows)

Ste

Re: Please Help. N900 died :-(. How can I access contacts on my Backup?
 

Look in the Backup folder on the SD card, and you'll find backup folders for each of the backups. In the latest one, you'll find a file called comm_and_cal.zip which can be unzipped with any utility that handles zip files. Inside that zip file is a file call addressbook.db, which is an sqlite database of the contacts on the device. You can use plenty of database reader programs to read that and look in the proper tables for the information you're looking for.

The format for the tables involved, but is documented several places. If you're diving for one particular number, doing it by hand is probably worth it. If you want to get all of them, it may be easier to have someone dump the database. There are a few python based apps for the N900 that would probably run on any linux based system, given the right packages are installed.

Re: Please Help. N900 died :-(. How can I access contacts on my Backup?
 

you could get another N900 and solve your problem immediately???

Re: Please Help. N900 died :-(. How can I access contacts on my Backup?
 

The firefox sqlite extension is quite useful for inspecting sqlite dbs.

Re: Please Help. N900 died :-(. How can I access contacts on my Backup?
 

Hi guys,

thank you for your feedback. So at least there is a way and I am getting slowly there. I looked at the file addressbook.db in the path Backup03\comm_and_cal\Root\home\user\.osso-abook-backup\db. The SQLite Browser I installed tells me, that it is not an SQLite3 Database and refuses to open it.
However, the file is readable with a textviewer (some kind of structured data with tags BEGIN:VCARD and END:VCARD. Inbetween I find my conatcs. Thanks god! It's not the most elegant way, but it works.

Now I am trying to find my notes, which I took in the calendar. I have identified the file calendardb.backup in the path Backup03\comm_and_cal\Root\home\user\.calendar. The content is defenitely there, but how to read it? what is .backup for a type?

Thx again
Ste

Re: Please Help. N900 died :-(. How can I access contacts on my Backup?
 

Never mind! calendar.backup is indeed an SQLite file. The Browser reads it perfectly!

Haleluya and thank you again.

Ste

Re: Please Help. N900 died :-(. How can I access contacts on my Backup?
 

Hi STE

Using SQLite Manager i've found the 'Compontents' table. I can't figure out how to conver the DateStart and DateEnd records into normal dates though.

How did you do that? i.e. what would this date translate to: 1096326000?

Thanks!
Bryan

Re: Please Help. N900 died :-(. How can I access contacts on my Backup?
 

Isn't that Unix time?