Evolution: Duplicating the Addressbook on a second computer
 

At minimum, I want to keep a copy of my addressbook, which is broken into 4 different CONTACTS files, on a second computer. But when I move the archived backup to the second Computer, Evolution insists the .evolution hidden file must located on the same PATH as it is in my first computer.

It says: Error Loading addressbook. We were unable to open this addressbook. Please check that the path /home/lucky/.evolution/addressbook/local/system exists and that you have permission to access it.


1st Computer path: /home/lucky/.evolution/addressbook/local/system

2nd Computer path: /home/kate/.evolution/addressbook/local/system


How can I get the 2nd computer's Evolution to accept the 1st computer's addressbook when I restore it via the Archive Restore function? (Or is the only way to make this work, by changing the user name of kate to lucky??? My wife won't like that....ha ha ha)

What really gets me, is, the first time I did this transfer from the 1st computer to the 2nd computer....it worked. Then, on a later update, doing the same transfer method, it insisted on this path thing. I even deleted .evolution trying to get it to forget about requiring this path, and it still came up insisting on the path BEFORE I even did the restore!

Thanks for your insight and help.

I personally would create a system link to the location Evolution insists the file be at. That way you wouldn't have to change the username (resulting in possibly a divorce!) and you could "trick" it into thinking the file was located there.

I've never created a symbolic link before.

So are you suggesting I first create user "lucky" on her machine. Then create the file path "/home/lucky/.evolution/addressbook/local/system" in "lucky". And then in lucky's directory "system" at the end of this path, open a terminal and say

"ln -s /home/kate/.evolution/addressbook/local/system/evolution .evolution"

??? So that the Evolution application running under Kate looks in lucky's path and is linked to the real .evolution in Kate's path? I assume that is going to require user kate to have permissions to go through "lucky"?

No don't create the user, just create the directory tree:

mkdir -p /home/lucky/.evolution/addressbook/local/system/evolution/

Then create the symbolic link (just as you've typed)


You might have to change the permissions on the directory tree (lucky) you made, but that's easy via a gui.

I should have mentioned a wrinkle at the beginning. Before we changed anything here, of the 4 different contact files, Evolution could see 2 of them, although they were the smallest files, plus, it contained all of our letters in all of the boxes. However, the two large sets of addresses in the 2 big contact files, mine and my wife's were not accessible or visible.

Ok. I created "/home/lucky/.evolution/addressbook/local and changed it's permissions for user "kate".

Opened a terminal in directory local in the above path, su-ed to root and said "ln -s /home/kate/.evolution/addressbook/local/system system"

--which I think is the correct path Evolution was wanting, rather than the path I first constructed.

The good news is, Evolution is no longer giving me the error message I mentioned above and I can also now access 3 of the 4 contact files.

The bad news is, the 1 contact file that Evolution is claiming isn't there is my wifes major address file (and she appears to be perusing a Internet site on "How to take your husband to the cleaners in divorce court".)

Well we got 3/4, that's a start. I don't use evolution so my linking was based off of what you where stating, but I'm glad the suggestion nevertheless was useful.

As for the last pesky address book what error is it exactly saying? Also, are you sure you are trying the right file? It seems odd to me our solution would work for 3 and suddenly not for the last one :scratch:

Remember, before we applied your link solution, I actually had 2 out 4 address books showing, plus all the letters in all the boxes were also showing. I was just concentrating so hard on describing the negatives I forgot to include the positives. Which brings us to the oddity you are commenting on, only then it was 2 out of 4 address books plus the letters were showing. It seems logical that what works for one, should work for all. The only screwy thing was it's insistence the missing address books should have been at the foreign path and questioning whether or not my wife's user had the proper permissions....



There is no error showing now at all. When I click on my wife's major address book the address display area is simply empty except for a a standard message saying, "There are no items to show in this view. Double-click here to create a new Contact."

Well, I'm truly at a loss now... I can't think of why it's not showing up. Nevertheless, keep me updated as now I'm intrigued on what might be causing it.

My one failsafe suggestion might be to merge the 4th pesky addressbook with another if thats possible. You might be able to open the addressbook up and edit it, I'm sure it's in XML or some human readable format.

As a last suggestion, make sure that user "kate" actually has read and write permissions on that addressbook file.

For debugging, try copying the third one that we got working to a safe place, then delete the original and rename the fourth one to look just like the third. If evolution "sees" it, we could narrow the possibilities of what might be causing the issue down.

Keep me posted on the results!