I’m trying to sort out some letters – trying to beat the Christmas posting dates (which we’ve failed to do, due to our holiday).
Unfortunately my Linux box is still dead, since I’ve not had time to tend to it properly and get it up-and-running. My address book is held in Evolution.
The FC6 boot CD, the “linux rescue” option, and some command-line tools came to my rescue.
Evolution stores the address book in Berkeley DB format. So, I booted into rescue mode, enabled my network interfaces, chroot’ed to /mnt/sysimage, and ran:
db_dump -p /home/andyp/.evolution/addressbook/local/system/addressbook.db > /tmp/addr.out
Once I’d done that, I was able to FTP the resulting text file to my laptop, and use vi to search for the address entries (vcards) that I wanted. Primitive, but effective.
[…] I was surprised to find that I hadn’t really missed the machine in 5 months, apart from the lack of access to my address book and quite a large number of photos. I knew that the data was at least safe, I just couldn’t […]