INTRO

An open source program named barrybackup allows Linux users to backup their BlackBerry devices on the Linux system. The result of this program is a gzipped tar file containing, among other things, the user's Address Book. The contacts in the Address Book are in a BlackBerry-specific binary format. In order to support Importing my contacts into GMail (and onto my Android device), I reverse-engineered the format. The result is a script that exports the Address Book from a barrybackup tarball to a CSV file.

The script was designed to recognize all of the useful fields in my own personal backup file. I did not have a BlackBerry to refer to when writing this program. The program is designed to be easily modified to add more fields in the future.

SCRIPT CREDITS and USAGE

bbab2csv - BlackBerry Address Book to CSV by Brandon Mintern, [email protected] Copyright 2011 Licensed under the GPLv2 Hosted on github

This program is designed to process the result of a backup produced by the barrybackup command line program. The result of such a backup is a tarball at ~/.barry/backup//--.tar.gz. Inside that tarball is a directory named "Address Book" which contains a binary file for each contact.

To run it, execute bbab2csv TARBALL where TARBALL is the file generated by barrybackup. The resulting CSV will be printed to STDOUT, and unrecognized data will be printed to STDERR.

DEVELOPER NOTE

The code is relatively simple, and adding new fields to be included in the CSV is as easy as editing a bit of code near the top of the file. See the comments in the script for more information.