Hi everyone! I’ve been running NC 14 on my server and syncing, among other things, my contacts onto it, using DAVdroid, plus having the nextcloud android client do the daily backup. Now, the issue is that the nextcloud instance got damaged during an update and after multiple failed recovery attempts I’ve given up and did a fresh install of nextcloud 16.
After so much as opening DAVdroid on my phone it promptly purged all locally stored contacts marked with my previous nextcloud account.
I have access to the (roughly 2.5MB in size) backup VCF files, along with a database backup and all files from the previous install.
The backup VCFs fail to import in android, as well as in evolution on my Linux desktop.
Any tips or pointers would be greatly appreciated since now I’m 100% contacts-free x.x
I had a similar problem. In my experience, Contacts has troubles when importing a big contact file. If you can split it in smaller chunks (maybe importing to Thunderbird - Lightning and exporting in several files), maybe you’ll be able to revert your contacts.
I’ve tried importing the vCard file into Thunderbird to no avail unfortunately. The issue seems to be down to the file’s format, android contacts reject the file due to it being an incompatible format as well.
Oh mighty cool, thank you! I shall try to use this, my plaintext editor didn’t like the vCard file, thinking it’s probably binary, so most likely the file is just fuc…ahem…corrupted.
It’s the server-side encryption. If you look on the client it should be unencrypted. If it is on the server, the easiest is to go back and restore the last working backup.
Unfortunately the server is long gone and since the contacts are backed up as hidden files, they’re not synced locally onto my PC. Is there a way to recover the encryption keys?
In your old setup, in the user directories on the server, there should be the encryption keys.
The thing about this server-side encryption is that it was designed for external storage, but it is used by most on a local storage where it does not provide the same level of protection. And you have to be careful to have good backups so you don’t end up with unusable files.
I’m not using the encryption module on my new instance anymore as the entire server is on a LUKS encrypted drive to prevent local access, while HTTPS takes care of en-route access. I’ll try to decrypt the files and report back.
Gave up trying to decrypt the files, there’s keys all over the place, no IVs, headache trying to piece the stuff together. Calcardbackup, as suggested by @Bernie_O, worked a treat! Kudos!
