ter Smitten's

A few months ago my N900 (touchscreen) died. Without a working touchscreen it proved to be impossible to operate it. Although I could have logged in via SSH unfortunately my WIFI and 3G were of 🙁 So there was no possibly to create an export of all my data. Fortunately I had a backup. The only problem was that the backup was just a set of zip files:

# ll
totaal 4,0M
-rw-r--r-- 1 lorem ipsum 1,1K sep 25  2011 applications.zip
-rw-r--r-- 1 lorem ipsum  678 sep 25  2011 backup.metadata
-rw-r--r-- 1 lorem ipsum 233K sep 25  2011 bookmarks.zip
-rw-r--r-- 1 lorem ipsum 2,2M sep 25  2011 comm_and_cal.zip
-rw-r--r-- 1 lorem ipsum 1,6M sep 25  2011 settings.zip

containing “raw” dumps of directories. Not particularly useful for transferring to a new phone…

After some searching I found a file called addressbook.db (in comm_and_cal.zip:/home/user/.osso-abook-backup/db/) which should contain my contacts (vcard data). I read that addressbook.db was a Berkeley DB (BDB) database file. Because I was learning Python I wrote a simple script to extract the vcard data from the database and write it as separate vcards (which are easy to import on other devices) to a folder.

I hope it useful for someone else and please comment my python skills 🙂

#!/usr/bin/env python
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-

import sys
import vobject
from bsddb3 import db

if len(sys.argv) != 2:
  print ""
  print "Usage:"
  print "%s [path to addressbook.db]" % sys.argv[0]
  print ""
  sys.exit(1)

fileName = sys.argv[1].strip()

addressBookDb = db.DB()
try:
  # Try to open db file
  addressBookDb.open(fileName, None, db.DB_HASH, db.DB_DIRTY_READ)

  cursor = addressBookDb.cursor()
  record = cursor.first()

  # Fill a list with vcard strings from db 
  vCards = []
  while record:

    # Get vcard string and correct line endings
    vCardString = record[1].replace('\x00', '\r\n')
    vCards.append(vCardString)

    record = cursor.next()

  # Write vcard strings
  for vCard in vCards:

    parsedVCard = vobject.readOne(vCard)
    
    # Not all entries have a n(ame) attribute
    if hasattr(parsedVCard, 'n'):
      vCardName = str(parsedVCard.n.value).strip()
      
      # Open vcard for writing
      with open('vcards/%s.vcf' % vCardName, 'w') as fd:
        fd.write(vCard)
      fd.close()

except db.DBNoSuchFileError:
  print ""
  print "Error:"
  print "Could not open '%s'" % fileName
  print ""
  sys.exit(1)

References:

• Nokia n900 mobile forensic cheat sheet