interestingly enough, i was just trying to figure out how to minimally back it up with a terminal over ssh, and found immense success.

after some testing, all you need is '/home/user/.cache/tracker/'!
{and /home/user/.local/share/data/libqtcontacts-tracker/photos for contact pix}
this is contacts and conversations and recent calls.

i backed it up {carefully record the perms and users}, then reflashed to factory default + openkernel {firmware, emmc, openkernel}. i then copied it back, set the perms, rsync'd it again to make sure it didnt change, then rebooted. when it booted back, everything was there.