How to repair Nokia’s Backup.arc?

Imagine: you've made a backup of your Nokia smartphone to two memory cards and tested restore with them before you updated your phone firmware at Nokia Service Point. After update neither one of the 14 MB backups restored. The restore process took only about two seconds. With older software it took about two minutes.

And... that's all! Your nokia smartphone (E70 in example) is just dead. What you should to do now?

Probably, the memory card tool has corrupted both of your backups on different memory cards or your backup contains something the memory card tool cannot handle. But - what you should to do now? Is there a way to get at least contacts and calendar from the backup.arc file? All what you have now is just dead smartphone and backup.arc file. How you can get you data back? Is it possible?

YES! And you can restore your data!

How to restore your phone's data?

1. Get Backup.arc file from your Nokia smartphone
2. Put it into separate empty directory on your PC
3. Download BACKUP_PARSER and put it into the same directory you've placed Backup.arc
4. Run parse_backup.exe

In the case of success operation you'll see several new files in the directory. Each of those files is some block if information from your mobile phone: images, documents, contacts list, calendar, options etc. Now you can open these files and try to understand who is who. Unfortenately, this software doesn't detect file types automatically yet. You can just try to rename some of that files to ".doc" or ".jpg" and open them - if you named it right way - it will open.

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 9th, 2007 at 4:12 pm and is filed under Life, Security. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.