How to read a pim.vol file

Question

Is there any desktop-based way to read the pim.vol file that stores contacts, tasks and calendar information on a Windows Mobile device? Ideally I'd like to find an export tool that would allow me to extract the data from mine, but I'd also settle for a library that would allow me to interface with the file and pull data out of it.

I've googled this quite a bit and haven't come up with any good answers. I'd appreciate any pointers.

Answer 1

There is no desktop based way to read vol files.

Vol files are CE database files which can be in one of two formats (CEDB, EDB). The pim.vol file is in EDB format. There is no desktop database libraries for these formats.

You can write a Windows Mobile application to export any vol file (it's not that hard). The problems you will have is that the pim.vol database table format is different between the different versions of WM.

If you want something to be WM version agnostic, you could use the POOM API, which is the WM native API for getting access to the PIM data. It's a lot slower than the direct database access tho.