Re: [Evolution] Address Book not Restoring

[Milan Crha <mcrha redhat com>]

On Tue, 2020-09-01 at 10:31 -0500, BC wrote:
> thought that was the purpose of regularly running backups.

        Hi,
that's true. What I've been trying to figure out whether, for some
reason, you'd not downgrade the evolution version by changing the
distribution. That would make it hard to restore from a backup, because
the code know the past, not the future (aka when the internal format
changes, the past code doesn't know what to do, while the new code know
what to do with the old data format to upgrade it to the new data
format).

> Should I try uninstalling Evolution and then reinstalling it, then
> opening with
> terminal and then restoring the backup???-- 

Oh. That's a good news, I hope. Does it fail with the recent backup?
The warnings from console about CSS and gtk and the like are all
unrelated.

> One thing I just thought of, I uninstalled thunderbird from the
> computer, including lightning, when setting up my new install.  Can't
> remember if I did that before or after restoring Evolution.
> Could that possibly be a contributing factor?

No, I do not think so. The two applications are completely independent.

When you check the content of the Evolution's backup file, it contains
an evolution.dir file, which has stored what version the Evolution was
when the backup had been created. The backup itself has similar
structure as described here:
https://help.gnome.org/users/evolution/stable/data-storage.html
Thus you can,e ventually, restore the files manually. The only problem
is to have all evolution-related processes closed when playing with the
internal files, which is not always possible (as for example GNOME
Shell keeps restarting evolution-calendar-factory, which runs other
background processes). You can eventually run:

    $ evolution --force-shutdown

and then verify the processes are down:

    $ ps ax | grep evolution

and/or run the force-shutdown also after manual restore.

How to extract only contacts from the sqlite3 database you can find at
the end of:
https://mail.gnome.org/archives/evolution-list/2015-October/msg00089.html
That might be easier than to restore everything. You just need to point
sqlite3 to the correct database file (from the backup file). And to
delete old contacts in the target address book.

        Hope it helps,
        Milan