Restoring contacts from Nokia NBU backup file after upgrade

I am a massive fan of the Nokia N95 Mobile phone. I travel a lot on business and have used it extensively for photographing where I go and video too. I use the GPS capabilities whenever I need to know exactly where I am out in the back end of beyond and the wireless lan capability allows me to call home from anywhere with wifi effectively free of charge where ever I may be in the world.

Despite being such a huge fan I can find fault with it, mostly instability issues with some of the applications crashing, and the appalling battery life. So when I read just before Christmas that Nokia had released a new update to the software I decided I better install it as it makes quite a few improvements...

I used the excellent Nokia PC Suite to back-up everything first then applied the patch. All seemed fine. Then I restored my contacts and other things from backup. All seemed fine again. However when I checked - nothing had been restored... Yikes! All 300+ contact phone numbers lost...

I did the obvious - opened the backup ".nbu" file with notepad and discovered that everything was backed up properly, just not restored... so I surfed and discovered several people reporting the same problem. Most seemed to suggest using a tool called Noki - but its not FREE! Being a skin flint I kept digging and found the following Nokia tool which worked a treat.

http://nds1.nokia.com/files/support/global/phones/software/Nokia_Contact_Transfer.exe

From what I can tell - a shift in major version number leaves the backed up files incompatible with the new version. This little tool works very simply. Connect the phone, find the back up file with the contacts in and select "Copy to phone". It was done in seconds and Free. Thanks Nokia.

Synching the Nokia N95 with Google Calendar via GooSync

I am regularly away from the office and often abroad, in meetings and out of contact with those I work with. One of the best things we did about a year ago was shift all our email and calendaring over to Google Apps. This enables us to have shared on-line calendars and a superb web based email client.

That's great when the web is available, but knowing what is in the calendar when in the remote hills of Tamil Nadu or even in my front room at home, where I can't access the internet or mobile network has caused problems.

So when I discovered GooSync I thought my troubles were over. I visited the site and configured the service. I'd read it was good in several places so felt confident it would be OK for me. To register one has to provide your Google Apps credentials, and mobile phone number. They state on the website that they will SMS you the configuration you need for the Sync facility on the N95. I tried 4 times, and the SMS never came.

So for those of you who experience the same problem this is what you have to do to configure it manually on your Nokia N95. Firstly make sure you have set-up your GooSync account then follow these steps on your Nokia N95.

1. Select Tools menu from the Main N95 Menu.
2. Select Sync
3. Create a new Sync Profile
4. Give the Sync Profile a name - eg Google Calendar
5. Choose Application option from menu and pick Calendar
6. Change "Include in Sync" to Yes
7. Set Remote Database to "Calendar"
8. Under connection settings set host address to http://sync.goosync.com/
9. Enter your GooSync username and password.

Bingo. That was all that was needed. Now select your new Sync Profile and from the menu press Synchronise. Within a few seconds all my calendar entries from my Google Apps calendar were also in my Nokia N95 calendar. Superb.