Recover iPhone/iPad contacts from iTunes Backup

This blog details on how to recover iPhone/iPad contacts from iTunes backup. As we all know, Apple has iCloud to back up your contacts & recover when you need them. But for some reason my all iCloud contacts are lost & i left with no contacts.

However my iPhone was backed up to my computer long back before iCloud arrived & there the adventure to recover contacts began. There are some commercial software products in the market which can help you to recover but it comes at steep price of USD25. If you are interested to buy, can access following link (I haven’t used it & buy at your own risk). Before buying you can see how many contacts, notes, photos can be recovered etc.

http://www.iphonebackupextractor.com/

Being a software professional, i felt spending $25 would not be worth in recovering contacts. So i went about googling in trying to find the way to get contacts. After many hours, i finally found way to recover. The process is detailed below & i am assuming you have minimum knowledge to use computer like opening files, unzip files etc.

Tools Required (Free ):

https://code.google.com/p/iphonebackupbrowser/downloads/detail?name=iphonebackupbrowser-r38.zip&can=2&q=

This is mainly to identify the AddressBook/contacts file from numerous files (hashed file names).

http://www.yunqa.de/delphi/lib/exe/fetch.php?hash=436a6a&media=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.yunqa.de%2Fdelphi%2Fdownloads%2FSQLiteSpy_1.9.3.zip

This is to extract contact data from AddressBook file.

Both tools are in zipped version & need either winzip or winRAR for unzipping.

Step 1: Identify Correct Back Up & Address Book file with in the Backup.

Open “iphonebackupbrowser.exe” from unzipped folder of iphonebackupbrowser. Tool automatically selects the valid iTunes backup’s & identify the Backup from which you need to recover contacts. If the system could not identify, you can select backup from following location in Windows Vista or later OS.

C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Roaming\Apple Computer\MobileSync\Backup  (Substitute your own username)

Once Backup is selected, tool automatically populates with all file names. Go to “System” in top window & it will populate all files located in “System” in bottom window (See below picture). In bottom window, sort by names (by clicking on Names). With in that identify the contacts file with name “AddressBook.sqlitedb” .

Click on the file & browser points to the original file name in the Backup location. The file usually starts with 31bb… Copy the file to some private location so that our recovery process don’t accidentally alter the file. Although we can use file without copying to private location(for example Desktop), it is strongly recommended to avoid potential damage due to ours/tools mistakes.

Step 2: Recover contacts from AddressBook file

Open SQLiteSpy & open AddressBook file (starting with 31bb) in SQLiteSpy.

It populates various tables found from the file. Identify table with name “ABPersonFullTextSearch_content” (see below picuture). Right click on table & click on “Show Data”. It opens new window with all your contact details. There are your contacts & finally you recovered your contacts. Unfortunately SQLiteSpy doesn’t allow to export in to a txt or CSV file (as far i know) & you need to manually search for required contact & identify numbers. This is the small price you need to pay for free service :).

The phone numbers can be found in column 15 (c15)  where as Last & First names are in c1 & c2 columns. If you don’t have different numbers for Mobile & iPhone numbers, same will get populated twice (I even saw some numbers got repeated 5 times).

Hope this helps. Let me know if you hit any issues through comments below. I will try to respond to best of my ability.

some books to give away to save space

Being a software programming guy i was having lot of technical books which may not add much value at this stage or which i most probably may not explore further in future. instead just throwing through our apartment chute, i am hoping there can be someone in singapore who is looking for these books & can be useful to them.

Once again i make clear that the following books are not for sale & anyone interested can have them free.

*Digital Signal Processing, A practical approach by Emmanuel C. ifeaachor & Barrie W. Jervis (Second Edition)

*The 8051 Microcontroller and Embedded Systems by Muhammad Ali Mazidi & Janice Gillispie Mazidi (2006)

*An Embedded Software Primer by David E. Simon (2006)

*Linux Kernel Development by Robert Love (Second Edition)

*Understanding the Linux Kernal by DANIEL P. BOVET & MARCO CESATI (Third Edition)

*Linux Device Drivers by Jonathan Corbet, Alessandro Rubini & Greg Kroah-Hartman (Third Edition)

C++ in Action – Industrial-Strenght Programming Techniques by Bartosz Milewski

Effective STL – 50 specific ways to improve Your use of the Standard Template Library by Scott Meyers

* These books are low priced edition of original book & allowed for sale in indian sub-continent only. Low priced edition are printed so that the books are accessible in poor countries considering cost of original US print.

Leave a comment to get any of above books. Needs to be personally collected @ Hougang/Kovan.

Update: These books are no longer available

YOG opening ceremony

Last Saturday(7 Aug) i have attended final combined full dress rehearsal for YOG opening ceremony due on 14th Aug.  It seems most of YOG workforce were given rehearsal tickets as token of appreciation. We were given light green sector (25000+ seats divided in to Dark Green,light Green, Yellow, Red, Blue seats). Light green is around 30deg angle to centre of stage. I reached stadium around 6:30p.m and went on to top (3rd row from top) finally landed an empty seat beside one gentleman (All seats beside beautiful girls are occupied :P).  As still lot of time left, i started playing some puzzle & racing games on my iphone. When countdown is some where around 35min or so they started warming up crowd by encouraging  people to do mexican wave (although they added local flavor and called it marina wave. Singapore never inhibit in copying others 😀 ) and some kind of dance steps etc. It was bit fun to watch so many people move their body. Each attendee will be given goodie bag which contains electronic dove and love symbol to wave during ceremony (we were not given but there were few audience leaders who had them) .

2010 YOG is scheduled to start at 20:10, so finally the screens on stage started displaying 5,4,3,2,1 and then fire works started. Fireworks has become common in singapore for every notable event like National day, New Year & YOG etc. I should say fire works have become quite monotonous as they look same for every celebration (for me this looks muted down compared to new year. Not sure whether they  haven’t unleashed full potential for this rehearsal). Then came display of singapore culture by all ethnics aka chinese,indian,malay etc. They also announced “welcome president of singapore” etc..  you know president is too busy to attend rehearsals, but they want to say, what they are supposed to say on 14th aug and we were sensible enough to understand all that. We all stood up for singapore national anthem and singapore flag was hoisted on corner.

Welcomed YOG athletes en masse. They mocked this by getting some huge school children. Most of front rows facing stadium are reserved for athletes seating. It took some time for them to get seated. Then there were few displays of dance, enaction of displays based on olympic chapter themes (these were quite boring if not for some fancy display of  different creatures). Then started flag ceremony with one carrying board written with country name and other carrying flag. As usual they started with greece and then alphabet order and singapore at last as host country. there were big applause for asian nations and to my surprise spain received very big applause and also many football dominant countries like argentaina, brazil and recent world cup hosts south africa. I tried to gave some big lion roar when india turn came up. It took a while to call up all 205 countries and there are country names which i never heard of (i doubt anyone of 25000+ heard of them all).  Then came speech by IOC president, YOG chairman (they put mock persons who said start speech and end speech causing laugher from crowds). Finally olympic anthem was played and 5 rings flag was hoisted. Three guys took olympic pledge on behalf of athletes,coaches and umpires. Then few more fire works and they said it is end of reharsal after nearly 2hours. But one thing they left out is lighting up YOG torch. It was for reason as normally it is kept secret who’z going to light and lit only once. But i saw huge cauldron at centre of stage probably for torch. In all it may take around 2 and half hours to complete opening ceremony considering real speeches will be crisp.

But overall my opinion about opening ceremony is mixed. There were some good displays but i expected more out of first ever youth olympics opening ceremony (fire works are not up to mark, if they are going to be same on 14th august).

P.S: I have taken some pictures, but before we left they asked not to post any pictures until opening ceremony. So i would like to respect that and more over pics are not of great quality as i am at last row and took from my mobile.

YOG workforce appreciation party

I have just seen mail that after YOG  a party will be held for all workforce. They have chosen some tantalizing place called “Universal Studios” singapore. The ticket for this will only be given on last day of work. In a way they are trying to entice workforce to keep motivated until last day. Good thought but i wonder how many are so excited about Universal Studios considering it is not fully operational and one of the smallest in world.

Party will be held on 15,16 and 17 September. Each one will have chance to attend on one of those days.  Having said all that i may consider going there if time suits me (not interested in taking half day leave as dates fall on weekdays).

In the end said more details will be provided when we report for duty. so wait continues!!

Canon printer experience

In last computer expo in jun (in singapore some kind computer expo held every 3mths but wtih diff name  PC expo, IT expo etc..) my eyes fell on SGD99 printer by canon. I was looking to buy some printer and being it cheapest and as canon is known brand i went for it. Model no is MP-258. It is an all in one printer that can support print,copy & scan.

Although it came at cheaper price, the quality of print is not at professional level. It serves purpose but some times i observed letters were printed in some curved form. I self satisfied my self  by reminding  quality of service is directly proportional to quantity of money invested.

I have printed some where around 200 pages until now and mostly with 2-side, duplex and gray scale  printing. Then i was shocked to see that my black ink cartridge had started to look empty  or near empty(color cartridge still shows full as it is hardly used) . So i finally decided to buy a spare black cartridge for future replacement. I went to hougang challenger store and initially couldn’t remember my printer model no to find correct cartridge. Thanks to iphone, singtel and canon online warranty i could dig in to my warranty info and find model as MP-258.

Finally i picked up black cartridge and it costs Coooooool SGD26. As package looks big i thought it contains two but to my disappointment just one. Still i went ahead and bought one. On way back home i was thinking about usability of cartridge. if i can just able to print some where around 300 pages (optimistic estimation) for one cartridge  then SGD99 can cover just 1200 pages in monochrome. So in then end just for printing 1200 pages  you need to shell out maintenance cost equal to price of printer itself!!!!!!. I felt like this is some clever robbing from canon or to some extent every printer company. I am aware that most of printer companies makes their profit out of ink cartridge only but i didn’t know goes to this extent. I am feeling gutted that i made some wrong choice in going for cheap printer without minding maintenance. I better careful next time in buying printer. It is better to go with one which may burn your money at initial investment rather than going for high maintenance. Currently i am not aware which one better..but will surely do some research before next purchase.

In next IT show..i try to buy some third party cartridges if they can offer at reasonable price. It is not at all worth spending 1/4 th of printer price for just one black cartridge!!!! i hate spending like that..

When i was about to pay my bill , cashier asked for my NRIC no for membership confirmation and suddenly the one next in queue was so excited and asked are you member???? i was never been such excited being challenger member.. In the end she wants to pay by my membership so that she can get some SGD7 rebate. i happily agreed for that!!. Challenger doesn’t mind also. That’s only happy moment of disappointing shopping..

iPhone apps for singapore

After much deliberation & holding on for two months i finally got my iphone 3GS from singtel. I have took  a plan with 12GB data bundled. The main reason for deliberation is to go for Android (which supports flash) or iphone (which has fantastic app eco system). Finally i went for later.

It has been nearly 2wks since singpost delivered iphone to me ( i ordered online on http://www.singtelshop.com and got SGD30 discount).  I had some mixed experience so far.

• It took lot of pain for me to identify where to place sim and opening sim holder was not easy. In the end i can do it thanks to toothpick.
• once i inserted sim couldn’t see any singal and only emergency calls are allowed. So i had bit nervous moments for some time. Did i get some f..ked up piece?? i immediately called up 1688 (singtel cust ser) and they told i need to first register phone on itunes before use. once registration done everything was ok.

Next comes finding necessary apps out of nearly 200K on itunes. I don’t want to clutter my phone too much.so i went for very few apps. Before i got my iphone i went thru web to find apps which sync with me. so finally i have downloaded few apps.

Finance: DBS, CitiBank, OCBC Bank , iNETS mobile , XE currency for conversion

Travel: transSGuide (recommended) , iCab for taxi booking ( never used as of now).

Health:  iHealthSg (list all clinics in singapore, highly recommended )

General: SingTel Data Usage, My SingTel (check bills) , SG Malls (lists shops in all malls), LocacitySG (lists many places like DBS/POSB ATMS, Post office, AXS machine etc ), Price Pal (this checks price of groceries if you make app to read bar code. this doesn’t support all markets and reading bar codes isn’t tht fantastic ), iCashSg (lists all three sing bank ATM’s ).

I have downloaded few more but not relevant to singapore. Will update in some other blog later.

If you come across some apps which you find valuable for iphone users in singapore,  please leave post in comment section.

Volunteer for YOG

As some of Singaporeans are already aware that singapore is going to be host to first “YOUTH OLYMPIC GAMES” starting from this august 14th. As this is for ages from 14-18 this may not generate such big buzz everywhere. I am volunteering for YOG as NTO (national technical official). I will be doing tennis line umpire with nearly 40 fellow Singaporeans.

I have collected my accreditation card & uniform in last week. As is case with YOG logo uniform is purple collar Tee & khaki Bermudas from crocodile. They have given some nice cap, wet tissues and sun protection cream (i am bit surprised to see that but still it helps lot). I am reasonably happy with dress colors although i am still bit amazed why singapore is so fond of purple & orange (most of sing buses are of same color).

Coming to my work..  we had nearly around 10days of training from last November and still we feel very nervous considering most of our practice was done at some medium level of players whose speed is relatively modest compared to guys going to play in YOG. I am more interested in calling service line although it is most toughest to concentrate. but once you make your call..you can relax until next serve. most of my colleagues are bit scared to do service considering speed involved and easy to make mistakes.

I got mail from our supervisor that 2000 ppl will be present on first day of 15 Aug. Excited to see how it goes? If you are part of YOG please share your details.

Disclaimer: please don’t share sensitive information like security, vendors, etc.  Strictly no names etc.

TI BA II plus calculator in singapore

Yesterday i bough TI BAII plus financial calculator at mustafa for SGD63.

It is available at ground floor where all electronic goods are sold (beside jewellery shop).

They also provide 1year warranty.

I have also found two shops where you can get same calculator and bit cheap also. (I found convenient to buy at mustafa as i go there every month)

http://www.parisilk.com/location.html (It’s store is located at 3 locations. but better contact by phone to check stock before proceeding to buy). Price is SGD56 and payment term is by cash or NETS.

http://www.li.com.sg/ContactUs/OurLocation.html . price is SGD52 and payment is by cash only.

Update 3 Aug 2010: I am planning to sell my TI BA II plus calc. Reason being i decided not to give CFA considering high opportunity cost.

I am willing to sell for SGD35. I haven’t used much so in a way it looks quite new.  Need to collect from kovan/Hougang MRT.

Update 5 Aug 2010: calc is sold out.

Is it worth taking CFA exam

In recent years CFA (Chartered Financial Analyst) has gained wide popularity with who want to enter or who are already working in financila industry. The main attractiveness of CFA is it is damn cheap (Basic registration, curriculum books and exam fee costs around SGD1600) compared to regular MBA and it is manily of self  study nature.  But the advantages stops over there. CFA demands lot of time and comittment to really pass exam. CFA Institute recommends at least 300hrs of study consideringyou have some basic financial knowledge. Many non finance professional see CFA as a means to enter financial career and if you are one of  those please consider it very carefully before making firm decision.

1) are you able to spend nearly 20hrs per week of study for nearly three years ?? (and it may take long also)? you may need to compromise on so many thing like going for out with family in weekends or spending time with kids or going for late night parties? Looks bit tough to forgo all these??

2) are you able to get afford pay cut from your current salary and join some financial institution (for ex bank) as a fresher?CFA  is awarded only when 4yrs of experience is acheived in related financial filed (and this is quite broad filed but limited to financial sector only). so it may really challenge in managing  your monthly financial commitment  against your earning?

3) And more importantly one should ask themselves why they really want to move in to financial field?? If it just for better pay and position may be need to give second thought? Money is always not guaranteed even after 3years of putting every effort in to CFA. If you really have some zeal with business and finance than your current job  it might be better choice for you. Without having some sort of attractiveness toward  business and financial  sector it might be tough task to complete CFA with in 3 years.

At least in my view if you can able to pass all above three steps , it may be right for you to give serious try at CFA?

All the best if you are proceeding to take CFA challenge.

Note: Register as early as possible after decision has been made to get curriculum books and also buy Financial calculator to get familiar with it for as long as possible. (only Texas Instruments BAII plus or HP 12c are allowed)

Hello Blogging!

This is my first ever blogging in 26years..(quite big landmark).. I tend to realize myself that slowly i am getting addicted to web but good thing is it is kind of addiction which may not cause any harm and even help. With in just one year my web life changed a lot..i opened orkut,twitter and facebook accounts (all with same username as this blog rajamandava) and chain reaction started.. you log in to twitter to put some updates and we start to put following and follower terms in to everyday’s use. (i got to wordpress through twitter and more on this later). And you start to check orkut & facebook just out of curiosity to know how your friends (sometimes friend’s friends…) are enjoying their life. And in the end all this leading to incremental rise in amount of time one spent on his laptop/desktop or latest hot one Net books..

Idea behind starting blogging: As i mentioned already twitter lead me to this page..i am quite fascinated about politics & business & computer related products & more passionately sports and reads lot of stuff related to them and watch on TV also.. over sometime i come across this strange name called Twitter and decided to give it try. But although i  am not the early embracer of tweeting , many of my friends are either not joined or joined and moved on to something new startup  product or i am not aware about their identity. So in the end i just started tweeting to me (no followers) and slowly some people found something intersting in me (not sure what it is) and started to follow me. oneday when i am going through some news feed on my nokia e71, i come across to some extent self claimed blogger in name of “AnilDash”. I just gone through his following list and come across some prominent names like US president Barack obama, 7 times Tour De France champion & cancer fighter Lance Armstrong and Cisco CTO padmasree to name few. And i also come across this wordpress (the symbol has some inducing power to attract ) and out of curiosity i checked what is wordpress about. At start i did not understand and then spending after some time (cyclic effect of following someone on twitter) finally understood that it is blogger application used by many people/companies. Then i started to give some thought of  having my own blog to share my ideas. So ended up in writing this  exciting blog about myself. Thanks to wordpress for dedicating public accessible link (with my name & wordpress name) to this blog .

As this is my very first blog, contains more about me rather than something useful .. but hopefully i can get some of my web time to blog  from now on with some thing intersting..(hope this blog is not such boring also..)

catch you next week and thanks for spending your valuable time on my blog.

Thanks

Raj