Ed Garay recently tweeted about a friend’s cell phone loss and wondered how often people backup their cell phone data. Immediately I thought “not enough” as I tried to remember back to the last time I made a backup of my own cell phone data. It turns out the last time I did so was back when I got the new phone several months ago. At the time I had used BitPim to transfer my contacts from my old phone to my new phone and everything worked well. My phone data had certainly changed since then, so, thanks to Ed’s reminder, I decided to immediately backup my data. This post details the experience backing up my LG VX8350 using BitPim on Ubuntu 8.10.
The first step was to install BitPim. Fortunately, a package is available for Intrepid and can be installed from a terminal as easy as
$ sudo apt-get install bitpim
In order to connect with the phone, I used the “Bluetooth Device Wizard” (found in the “Bluetooth Preferences” dialog) to pair my computer with my phone. This required that I set discovery mode to “On” in my phone so that I could select it from the list of devices found by the wizard. With the phone’s discovery mode still set to “On”, I probed the service settings using ’sdptool’ from a terminal as follows
$ sdptool browse [bdaddr]
substituting my phone’s hardware address for “[bdaddr]” above.
Next I attached the phone to a comm port using the following command
$ sudo rfcomm bind /dev/rfcomm0 [bdaddr] [channel]
where “[bdaddr]” is the same as my phone address as described above, and “[channel]” is the channel number used by the “BT DIAG” service as displayed in the output of the ’sdptool’ query.
The next step was to start up bitpim and find my phone. Using the “Find Phone” feature never seemed to work for me, so I had to manually setup the phone in the “Settings” dialog. I selected my phone type from the drop-down (in this case “LG-VX8350″) and used the “Browse” dialog to select the “/dev/rfcomm0″ port that I bound the phone to above.
Since I set my phone to always prompt when it receives a pairing request, I had to accept another pairing request from bitpim. Once accepted, I was able to send/retrieve data from my computer to my phone. I made sure to copy all of my important data, just in case I lose my phone as Ed warned in his tweet.
Tags: backup, bitpim, bluetooth, cell, cell phone, intrepid, phone, rfcomm, ubuntu
