Restoring my mobile phone backup to a new phone

My Sony Ericsson K610 mobile phone dropped dead.

The service guy removed my SIM and memory card from the fresh corpse, and stared me in the eye: "Do you have anything stored on the phone, sir? There are no phone numbers stored on the SIM"

I remembered storing everything on the phone instead of on the SIM.

I also remembered using Sony's PC Suite to backup the phone contents a couple of days ago.

"Don't worry, got backup" - I told the service guy.

Problem

The Sony Ericsson PC Suite recognized the new phone easily. I selected Tools/Backup&Recovery and started to shiver.

No backup was listed, and my sync to Outlook was 4 months old.

Research

First, I determined that I must find the old backup. I created a new backup for my new phone, called it "backup2" and learned that

the phone backups are stored with extension .dbk inside "My Documents", in folder

"Sony Ericsson\Sony Ericsson PC Suite\Phone backup".

As if by magic, my old backup file also turned out in this folder.

I realized that the file contents must be tagged with the phone information.

Opening the backup file with a text editor didn't help. It loooked almost completely binary.

However, there was a slight resemblance to something I saw before...

I created a copy of the dbk file, and renamed it with a zip suffix. That did the trick.

Solution

The key is in the phoneID.txt file.

Version=3.0

DeviceManufacturer=Sony Ericsson

DeviceModel=K610

HeartBeat=HB1-06

IMEI=3546xxxxxxxxxx

PhoneName=My K610

I replaced the file with the one found in the dummy backup of the new phone

Version=3.0

DeviceManufacturer=Sony Ericsson

DeviceModel=W595

HeartBeat=HB1-07

IMEI=3529yyyyyyyyyyyy

PhoneName=My W595

Changed the zip file extension back to dbk. Now Sony Ericsson PC Suite showed the old backups and I was able to restore all of my important information to the new phone.