How can I manually extract my contacts from a backup image of Android?

Question

So I recently made an .img using dd of my Froyo installation on my phone prior to wiping and installing a custom Jellybean ROM. Turns out that the contacts were saved locally and not with Google.

I cannot for the life of me find my contacts anywhere on the images when I mount them. I've also tried attaching the .img as an external SD card to see if it could import and then export the contacts in a virtual android emulator. I just can't find them anywhere. I'm guessing they're hidden in some sql database somewhere in the guts of the OS but I'm out of ideas. Is there a way to boot the .img as the main OS on the Android emulator? Is there an easier way to go about this?

Answer 1

Well, this took a long time. For future searchers, here's what you can do:

Find your contacts2.db file hidden somewhere in Android. Most of the time it's located in /data/data/com.android.providers.contacts/databases. I was lucky and found it in a search through Titanium Backups' tarballs. Nab that file. It has everything in it in a sql database.

I then found this excellent script to extract and convert all contacts into a .vcf format for easy importing into the next device. It's located here on Github and requires two dependencies (on an Ubuntu 12.04 machine in which it was written for): sqllite3 and libsqllite3-dev:

sudo apt-get install sqlite3 libsqlite3-dev

After dependencies are satisfied, save the script on Github as dbconverter.sh. Mark it as executable:

chmod +x dbconverter.sh

use the script like this:

./dbconverter.sh contacts2.db > contacts2.vcf

You will then have a lovely .vcf file for easy importing into your phone.

Answer 2

Chauncellor, your solution worked like a charm! Thanks for this!

Also works on Mac too, just download the sqlite 3 here, place all files (sqlite3, contacts2.db and the script) on the same folder and run the script. Pure magic! haha

Answer 3

For those who don't use dd, AppExtractor supports importing contacts from a Nandroid backup.