This document attempts to answer the question “Where do apps keep their data in the Sailfish filesystem?”

It may be useful to know the whereabouts of various apps if there is a serious problem with some app or feature. We would not recommend the command line approach for normal users but for those with programming skills.

NOTE 1:  OS release 3.4.0 and later can have either “defaultuser” or “nemo” as the primary user (admin) of Sailfish OS. Therefore, to express the paths in a generic way below, the environment variable “$MYHOME” is used. So, MYHOME stands for either “/home/defaultuser” or “/home/nemo”, and it holds its value also after getting the super-user rights with the “devel-su” command.

NOTE 2:  Most of the paths mentioned below require super-user rights for access. Hence, you need to enable the Developer-Mode.

Preparations

Go to your home directory first and define variable MYHOME:

cd $HOME
export MYHOME=$(pwd)
devel-su    ## SSH password required 

Sailfish apps

Calendar

$MYHOME/.local/share/system/privileged/Calendar/mkcal/

This directory contains the “db” and “db.changed” files for services like Google and CalDAV.

Exchange Active Sync (EAS)

EAS means the Microsoft Exchange services (email, calendar, contacts).

$MYHOME/.local/share/system/privileged/eas-sailfish/

This directory contains the SQL database file “sailfish_eas.db”.

Contacts

$MYHOME/.local/share/system/privileged/Contacts/qtcontacts-sqlite/  

This directory contains SQL files “contacts.db*”. They hold the contacts of all accounts and also the local (non-synced) contacts.

Avatars

$MYHOME/.local/share/system/privileged/Contacts/avatars/Google

This directory contains the avatars of contacts synced with the Google service.

Messages (SMS)

$MYHOME/.local/share/commhistory/

This directory contains SQL database (“commhistory.db*”) of text messages. We also have the related document “Exporting SMS and MMS messages”.

Notes

$MYHOME/.local/share/com.jolla/notes/QML/OfflineStorage/Databases/

This directory contains the SQL files “.ini” and “.sqlite” of Sailfish Notes.

Email

The email database is located in

$MYHOME/.qmf/

This directory contains the folders “database”, “mail” and “tmp”.

Call history

The phone call logs are kept in

$MYHOME/.local/share/commhistory/commhistory.db

This database can be investigated with the comm history tool…

commhistory-tool listcalls    
\## shows for example:
10404|3|Sat Feb 1 13:27:30 2014|Sat Feb 1 13:27:30 2014|2|0|1|0|0|(\[/org/freedesktop/Telepathy/Account/ring/tel/account0:+441555555555\])||||-1|||0|0|0|0|0|0||
\## and this is also in commhistory.db  

…and with SQLite:

sqlite3 .local/share/commhistory/commhistory.db --cmd 'select * from events where id="10404";'
\## shows:
10404|3|1391254050|1391254050|2|0|1|0|0|0|0|/org/freedesktop/Telepathy/Account/ring/tel/account0|+44555555555||||||0||||0|0||||0|0|0||0|0|0

Call recordings

Phone call logs on Sailfish OS 4.0.0 and later are kept in

$MYHOME/.local/share/system/privileged/Phone/CallRecordings/

The recorded calls are saved in “*.wav” files.

Ambiences

The storage of built-in ambiences of Sailfish OS resides in

/usr/share/ambience

Each built-in (default) ambience has a dedicated folder holding the actual ambience file and a subfolder containing the jpg of the background image.

All ambiences, the built-in ones and those created by the user are managed in an SQLite database at

$MYHOME/.local/share/system/privileged/Ambienced/ambienced.sqlite

Android apps

The common storage area of all Android apps is located at:

$MYHOME/android_storage/

It also contains the “Android” directory that has all the installed Android apps in the “data” subdirectory:

$MYHOME/android_storage/Android/data/