[anon(10427611)]

So here is my situation.
I did an "backup" of my calendar, contacts, etc. on my Blackberry Leap a couple of weeks ago with the Blackberry Content Transfer app since I intended to switch to Android soon (which I didn't do yet). I chose the SD card option, so I have the files "calendar.xml", "contacts.xml" etc on my SD card.
Yesterday, my phone experienced a water damage and and is not able to boot (a short lighting up of the red LED when switching the device on, then a high-frequency sound from the interior of the device, but no boot screen or anything). I thought I would at least be able to recover the data from the "backup" since the microSD card survived. But the xml files do not contain plain text, but "random" characters. I guess they are encrypted since the internal memory of my phone was also encrypted when I did the backup.
So I thought I could recover the data with the "Blackberry Content Transfer" app on an Android device. I set up Android-x86 as a virtual machine (since I don't have a physical Android phone yet) and installed the "Blackberry Content Transfer" app. I didn't use Google Drive, so i chose "Use another method", but the program was not able to recover the data from the xml files but needed the Blackberry Device inside the WiFi network. Since the device is broken, this is not possible in my case. So I uploaded the xml files to Google Drive and tried the Google Drive option, but the app gets stuck at "Connecting to Google Drive".
So, at the moment, I don't see any way to recover my calendar and my contacts. Do you have any idea how to decrypt the xml files? There is a file "salt" in the blackberry-content-transfer folder as well as a "system-crypt-file" on the SD card. I don't know if this is of any use to decrypt the files.

I would appreciate any help on how to recover my contacts and calendar! Thank you in advance.

Best regards!

P.S. When I did the "Backup" with the content transfer app, my phone was encrypted, but I disabled this option in the mean time. That means the files should be not encrypted on the internal storage. Is there any way to extract these files without being to boot the device?

[Troy Tiscareno]

When you encrypt your SD card, the ONLY way the data on that card can EVER be read is in the original phone that encrypted it, with the original BBID of the person who encrypted it. That's the whole point of encryption: that it can't be read by anyone if removed.

But this also means that any data stored on an encrypted media must be additionally backed up someplace else, because if anything happens to that original device, the data on the SD card is also lost.

The Content Transfer app only works with UNencrypted SD cards, because the data has to be unencrypted to be read on the new phone. It certainly can't break the encryption on your old SD card.

Short of having your original phone REPAIRED (and not replaced), the data on your SD card is lost forever, though you can reformat the card itself and use it again.

[anon(10427611)]

Thanks for your answer. I think you slightly misunderstood me. The SD card itself was not encrypted. I can read all the pictures and the music stored on it. Only the "Backup" via Blackberry Content Transfer seems to be encrypted. I thought it would somehow be possible to decrypt the data with my device password or with a key file also saved on the SD card.

Best regards

[Richard Buckley]

Thanks for your answer. I think you slightly misunderstood me. The SD card itself was not encrypted. I can read all the pictures and the music stored on it. Only the "Backup" via Blackberry Content Transfer seems to be encrypted. I thought it would somehow be possible to decrypt the data with my device password or with a key file also saved on the SD card.

Best regards

If you read the instructions on the following help log post you will see one of the steps is to turn off device encryption. I doubt that would be included if it wasn't important.

http://helpblog.blackberry.com/2015/...evice-to-priv/

[anon(10427611)]

Pretty annoying that the Blackberry Content Transfer app doesn't mention that turning off encryption is important.

Do you guys have any idea on how to rescue the data?

Best regards

[Richard Buckley]

Pretty annoying that the Blackberry Content Transfer app doesn't mention that turning off encryption is important.

Do you guys have any idea on how to rescue the data?

Best regards

No and I doubt that there is. You may feel hard done by. However in the past when there were ways to recover encrypted data from an SDCard on a BlackBerry that capability was used to defeat the device password. Many more people were upset by that. So, BlackBerry changed the encryption so that it now has no know vulnerabilities.