Ubuntu – How to convert Android’s contacts2.db to .vcf

androiddatabase

I have extracted my contacts2.db from a nandroid backup. I'd like to convert that to one or many .vcf files so that I can use my contacts in other applications.

I already found an answer that dealt with .db files but it did not work for this. I don't know if I did something wrong.

Best Answer

This seems to have been answered on our Android sister-site by Chauncellor:

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.

There are also other programmatic approaches on SO:

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