Download iPhone Contacts to Linux
Motivation: My Macbook Pro from 2006/2007 quit working and I needed to get all the contacts off my iPhone and onto my new HTC G2. You can’t just plug the phone into a windows machine and use iTunes to do a backup because the phone was formatted for OSX. Ubuntu One can sync the contacts but that costs money, as do most of the other contact synchronization apps in the iPhone market.
Requirements:
- Ubuntu Linux
- Python
- libplist
- libiphone
- git
- python-idevicesync
Steps:
Install the required libraries
sudo apt-get install git python-imobiledevice python-plist
Download the python-idevicesync script
git clone http://cgit.sukimashita.com/python-idevicesync.git/cd python-idevicesync
Connect your phone via USB: Ubuntu should auto-mount the device
Download the contacts to a vCard file
./iphonesync.py -o Data.vCard com.apple.Contacts
Data.vCard now contains all the contacts from your phone. You can then upload that file to Google Contacts and edit it to your liking. Now that I have my full address book on Google Contacts I can just use that to synchronize to my new phone.
Conclusion:
Exactly what I wanted. More information about interfacing iDevices to Linux can be found here: http://www.libimobiledevice.org
Interestingly enough, after the fact I realized that my friend’s brother runs the site… small world.
