Exporting messages and contact from Nokia Ovi Suite

With earlier Nokia PC suite versions it was easy to export your contacts or messages to an excel file, but this functionality was removed from recent Ovi Suite versions.

After some research I have found a way to export this information. I have tried it for the SMS messages, but did not do it for the contacts, that should work the same way.

First you have to syncronize the data you want to export with Ovi suite. When you do this Ovi suite is storing this data to MDataStore.db3 file which is stored in the Users\yourlogin\AppData\Local\Nokia\Nokia Data directory. This file is a SQLite 3 database and you can download a command line program from www.sqlite.org to handle it.

You start the program by sqlite3.exe nameOfYourDatabase and you get a sqlite> prompt.

The following commands will help you:

.tables - list the tables in the database
.schema tablename - list the fields in a database
.output filemane - to redirect results to a file in your computer
select * from MessageEX - to list your syncronized messages
select * from Contact - to list your syncronized contacts
.quit - to exit SQLite

After exporting the messages database, I have used Notepad++ with the HEX plugin to convert the 0d0a and 0d newlines in the messages to underscore _. Then I have imported it to Excel and deleted the not needed columns.

It requires some work to do, but it is faster and much more fun than typing in everything again.

Update: If you do not want to mess around with the command line sqlite handler, then you can use programs like SQLite Browser Portable which gives you a graphical representation of the database.

Update2: Since writing this article I was sucessfully exporting Contacts from one phone and importing into a Google account.

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