ter Smitten's

As I wrote before, a few months ago my N900 (touchscreen) died and without a working touchscreen it proved to be impossible to operate it. Therefore I ordered a new one which could, but did not fix my phone.

In order to recover my text messages I wrote a simple Python script which reads the el-v1.db file in comm_and_cal.zip:/home/user/.rtcom-eventlogger/backup.tgz (which is an SQLite 3 database) and writes the messages to a CVS file (which are better handled by other phones).

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

import sys
import sqlite3
import os.path
import csv
from datetime import datetime

if len(sys.argv) != 3:
  print ""
  print "Usage:"
  print "%s [path to el-v1.db] [path to csv file]" % sys.argv[0]
  print ""
  sys.exit(1)

dbFileName  = sys.argv[1].strip()
csvFileName = sys.argv[2].strip()

if not os.path.exists(dbFileName):
  print ""
  print "Error:"
  print "Could not open '%s'" % dbFileName
  print ""
  sys.exit(1)

with sqlite3.connect(dbFileName) as connection, open(csvFileName, 'wb') as csvFd:
  cursor = connection.cursor()
  writer = csv.writer(csvFd, delimiter = '\t', quotechar = '"', quoting = csv.QUOTE_ALL)

  sql = "SELECT start_time, remote_uid, free_text FROM Events WHERE event_type_id = 7"
  for record in cursor.execute(sql):
    startTime, phoneNumber, textMessage = record
    
    startDateTime = datetime.fromtimestamp(startTime).strftime('%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S');
    phoneNumber   = phoneNumber.encode('utf-8')
    textMessage   = textMessage.encode('utf-8')

    writer.writerow([startTime, startDateTime, phoneNumber, textMessage])

connection.close()
csvFd.close()

Enjoy!

References:

• Nokia n900 mobile forensic cheat sheet