Greetings wonderful N9 community. It's been refreshing seeing jmo707 post recently - someone just now getting an N9.

My family is an N9 family. I have one, my wife has one and my son has one. Mine is working well, but the other two are being replaced. I recently bought them new N9s and have been trying to set them up. In fact, I bought them the day before the OVI store went offline, but was too busy to migrate both their phones that week.

I've been trying to migrate everything, including installed apps, and that hasn't been going so well. So I ask for your collective insight as to how to make this process work.

I've started with my wife's phone. Here is what I have done.

Her phone was pretty straightforward, stock and un-tweaked. But to capture apps, today I installed N9QTweak. I did the backup of all apps to .deb files. I followed the instructions on the froberg.me website for backing up messages. I then used PC Suite to restore the contents of the backup to the new phone. I stopped working on the messages at that point because the apps seemed to be the bigger hurdle to clear.

I copied the /home/user/MyDocs/BackDeb folder in its entirety over to the same path on the new phone.

I allowed installation from untrusted sources, installed Warehouse, then a couple of the apps that are available there (Meecast, exNote were it thus far).

I then enabled Developer Mode and installed N9QT.

From within N9QT, I then did option EE-2 to install CodeRus's Aegis-Installer and that appears to have installed without incident. I then selected option X-1-2 to install all backed up .debs and selected 1 because the trusted subfolder is empty. But as soon as I hit enter the script quits and nothing happens.

Just for fun, I tried X-1-2 with 1 <space> 2 and at least I see something trying to work with the Trusted folder, but again, there isn't anything in there and the script throws an error and then dumps me back to N9QT asking what I want to do next.

I even installed Warehouse, then Filebox and then tried double-clicking on a few of the .deb files and they do not install, giving me an error.

Really, getting the apps installed is the most crucial step. The user files I'm comfortable copying over using the phone in Mass Storage Mode. The SMS and MMS messages would be nice and maybe following that procedure to which I referred above I will be successful. But this not having OVI store is making life challenging. I haven't even gotten to the Maps and navigation voices yet. I hope that goes easily.

All that being said, I'm willing to take notes and help create a new guideline for people like myself who want to migrate from older, broken N9s to, well, still-old but shiny and new(er) N9s in this post-Microsoft-shutdown era. I think some of the steps in said guidebook would also be helpful for people like jmo707 who are just discovering the N9 and need our help to make the most of it.

Thank you for your help!

If you have .deb files of all the apps you want to install you could try approach that has been good for me at least.

Copy all your .deb to one specific folder and then give this command in terminal This should then install all the apps located in that folder. You should, however, pay attention that all dependencies are available before hand and you should not install apps that require something "special" like rebooting the phone etc. I use this for all basic apps and it has worked for me. Never have used that N9QTweak option, but usually everything works well with Schturmans app.

I would encourage you to try to find as many apps from warehouse as possible and install them from there.

Wow! Thank you for such an easy and apparently effective solution.

I am going through her apps one-by-one. So far her ActionCam app appears to load but not access the camera. Other than that, everything else looks right to me. I probably should have filtered out what's in that directly a little, but nothing has bricked her phone yet.

Thank you!

Will this work with paid apps from the store like bejeweled? As the store is down now I don't know what I should do when I have to flash my N9 again - now I'm afraid playing around with it ...

Tested last week with jmo707 restore of N9QT generated Backups from July 2013 - .deb saved in folder BackDeb/All. Never used payed apps.

Would suggest to test out restore of own saved payed apps with (borrowed) second N9 or get new personal contacts (you are welcome contact me) via Turnschuhnetzwerk, some N9 remaining in Germany yet.
Please report the result here.

Edit: Here is a solution from Microsoft Mobile Community via our payed N9 support whoeveritdoesnow

perfect - MS troubleshooting - never changed since Win 3.11 :-)

It is not funny.
Nokia Enthusiasts like aspergerguy try to help there (without charge?), and microsoft sells it at The Microsoft Mobile Community.

this http://www.microsoft.com/en-xm/mobil...oubleshooting/ is funny

Sucessfully tried to contact support when not enough help from MS on this page? Not funny indeed...more waste of time.

when I try to make backups with N9QT it gives me an error while trying to install binutils: "could not resolve host downloads.memo.nokia.com" ...