ubuntu-phone team mailing list archive

[Geoff Lowther <ubuntuone@xxxxxxxxx>]

I realize that there's a lot of talk on here at the moment about being 
able to back up the phone to a desktop/server/cloud somewhere - I agree 
that the phone needs this facility as otherwise I'm stepping back to 
before I had a Palm Treo 650 - that had a separate program on the 
desktop that ran primarily under windows but ran equally as nicely under 
wine.

I reluctantly put my contacts onto google and 'upgraded' to a HTC Desire 
running Android 2.x or similar when the Treo was on it's last legs, 
realizing that at this point I had really lost control of where my data 
is/was. I am now trying to take control of it again...

I am trying to sort out my contacts on my MX4.

I synced the MX4 with google originally (September time 2015) and it 
seemed to corrupt google contacts by losing some complete entries and 
losing fields in other entries - fortunately I could restore the 
contacts in google. I then removed the syncing and ran it completely 
separately - not ideal, but works for the most part.

I had to relink to my google account again for another reason (it 
escapes me why at the moment) and I now have duplicates in my address 
book that I want to rationalize.

From what I believed, the contacts are stored as a db file under 
home/phablet/.local/share/evolution/addressbook/system called 
contacts.db. I believed as well that it is really an evolution contacts 
database file (more than just stored there in a clever format).

I therefore tried to be clever, installed evolution on my desktop PC and 
then copied the contacts.db file across and replaced the file in 
/home/namehere/.local/share/evolution/addressbook/system

When I open evolution it can't seem to access that file though (I've set 
the permissions the same) - may be just something to do with the address 
book names inside the contacts.db file but don't know.

Does anyone have any 'end-user' type ideas for how to open the contacts 
file in a readable way so that I can modify it, re-save it, then 
transfer it back down to the phone please.

I'm not a programmer, but more of an end-user who understands 
sufficiently about Linux to 'get by' sometimes on the command line but 
preferring to use a GUI where possible.

Any suggestions welcome

Many thanks
Geoff