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In older versions of KDE, Kontact used to keep it’s data in portable formats. iCalendar files for KOrganizer and vCard for KAddressBook. But sometime ago Kontact moved to akonadi, a more sophisticated backend storage. By default (at least on my machine) Akonadi uses MySQL (with InnoDB) as the perssistent storage. I didn’t consider it thourghly when moving my data to Gnome, and I got stuck with the data.

To make things worth, somewhere along the update to KDE 4.6, I got some of the data moved to ~/.akonadi.old. Being stuck with the InnoDB tables, I tried the following solutions without much success:

1. Loading the InnoDB tables to a MySQL server. Didn’t fare good, MySQL complained about weird stuff, and I gave up in search of simpler solution.
2. I booted a OpenSuse virtual machine with KDE and tried loading my old data. Apparently, my ~/.akonadi folder, contained nothing interesting and Suse’s KDE 4.6 refused to load the data ~/.akonadi.old after I renamed it.

So being upset about Akonadi I did some greping and found strings from my contacts and todo lists in the following files:

Binary file .local/share/akonadi.old/db_data/ibdata1 matches
Binary file .local/share/akonadi.old/db_data/akonadi/parttable.ibd matches
Binary file .local/share/akonadi.old/db_data/ib_logfile0 matches

I opened the files with vim, and found out the contained vCards and iCalendar blobs in them. So instead of directly storing them on the file-system, where they are easily accessible, they are stored in the DB files. I figured it would be easiest to just extract the data from the binary files. I’ve used the following script:

import sys

START_DELIM = "BEGIN:VCALENDAR"
END_DELIM = "END:VCALENDAR"
def main():
    bin_data = sys.stdin.read()
    vcards = []

    start = bin_data.find(START_DELIM)
    while start > -1:
        end = bin_data.find(END_DELIM,start+1)
        vcards.append(bin_data[start:end + len(END_DELIM)])
        start = bin_data.find(START_DELIM, end+1)

    print "\n".join(vcards)



if __name__=="__main__":
    main()

It reads binary files from stdin and outputs iCalendar data that is embedded in it. If you change START_DELIM and END_DELIM to VCARD instead of VCALENDAR, it will extract the contacts’ data.

This migration, had me thinking how important it is that application’s data should be easily portable. It’s a thing, I feel not many projects have high enough on their priorities.