Contacts database in Evolution

[hnimmo]

Having done a fresh install of Tumbleweed and restoring my Evolution files including

.local/share/evolution/addressbook/system/contacts.db

the Evolution contacts list is empty, although the restored contacts.db file has 470kB of data. Can anyone tell me how to restore missing pre-requisites for showing the email contacts in Evolution?# System Details Report

## Software Information:
- **OS Name:**                                     openSUSE Tumbleweed
- **OS Build:**                                    (null)
- **OS Type:**                                     64-bit
- **GNOME Version:**                               47
- **Windowing System:**                            Wayland
- **Kernel Version:**                              Linux 6.13.6-1-default

[john_hudson]

My experience has been that Evolution expects you to save a backup and then restore that backup when you have moved.
Examining my setup I see that Evolution has set up another folder with a random name in the addressbook folder which also contains a smaller file contacts.db. I suspect that this is the one that appears in your Evolution Contacts view rather than the one in the system folder.

[hnimmo]

I saved all system files/folders before the upgrade and restored them to the respective folders. Although contacts.db is apparently in the right place, there are no contacts in the Evolution contacts view. What needs to be set to make the contacts visible, or have they gone?

[john_hudson]

This may not work but I would try creating a single contact; then have a look in addressbook to see if a new folder with a random name has been created. If it has, copy contacts.db from the system folder to the new folder. Do all this non-destructively so that you can go back if it does not work.

[hnimmo]

I imported an old .vcf list successfully and the contacts db was not changed in size. I suppose I should be satisfied with that.

[john_hudson]

Sorry, I suspect the problem is that Evolution expects to be restarted using a backup rather than finding previously used data on the partition. That was my experience many years ago when I first tried to upgrade to a new version of openSUSE and found that Evolution would not use the existing files on my unchanged /home folder, only what I had stored in my last backup before the upgrade.