[kwlug-disc] help syncing Blackberry on Ubuntu 10.4

[Chris Frey]

On Wed, Jul 07, 2010 at 11:49:12AM -0400, R. Brent Clements wrote:
> The screen on my BB is lighting up but not displaying anything.
> Before I take it to get fixed or replaced I need to back it up.  I
> installed the barry utils and ran the backup, but was surprised to see
> that nothing was human-readable, so I am a little worried.  Is that
> normal?  and if I end up with a different BB will it restore
> correctly?

Hi Brent,

Did you use the GUI backup?  I'm assuming yes.

It is true that the backup stores the data in binary format, in a tar
file.  This format is recognized and parsed by the BlackBerry itself,
and it is the format we would have to use in order to do a restore.
So parsing and building is a waste.  The backup just stores the data
the device gives us.

This format has been extremely stable across devices, although some changes
are slowly appearing in newer devices.  Moving data from one device to
another using backup and restore is quite possible.


> I tried to get the msynctool to copy the addressbook.  I can't find
> any problem with the configuration, but I get the message "Member 1 of
> type barry-sync had an error while connecting: database name not
> found: Calendar"
> 
> I tried disabling syncing of the calendar, but it didn't help.
> 
> Any help would be appreciated.

Some of the newer BlackBerries have multiple calendars per email address.
My test devices don't support this, so I haven't been able to do a lot of
work on it.  If there is no pure "Calendar" database in the list when
you do a 'btool -t' then syncing won't work out of the box.

If you just want a human readable list of contacts as a worst-case backup,
you can do:

	btool -d "Address Book"

- Chris