How to get contacts from a DBK file into Outlook PST?

Found a .dbk backup from my old Sony Ericsson phone made with the Sony PC Suite years ago. My contacts from that era are only in this file.

The phone is long gone and PC Suite will not install on Windows 10. Can I pull the contacts out and into Outlook?

Good news: a DBK file is just a renamed ZIP archive, so you do not need PC Suite or the phone at all.

1

Copy the .dbk file somewhere safe, then rename the copy to .zip.

2

Extract it with Explorer or 7-Zip. Inside look for the contacts data, typically vCard files or a contacts folder with .vcf entries depending on the PC Suite version.

3

If you find one big .vcf, that is a multi contact vCard holding everything. If you find many small ones, select all for the next step.

4

In Outlook: File, Open and Export, Import/Export, Import a VCARD file, and point it at the vcf. Older Outlook versions import only the first contact from a multi contact vcf, in that case drag the vcf onto the Contacts folder instead or split it first.

If the extracted archive holds XML instead of vCards, it is a very old PC Suite backup format. The contact fields are still readable in the XML, so worst case you copy them into a CSV with Name and Phone columns and import that via the same wizard using Comma Separated Values.

Renamed to zip and there they were, one big vcf with 212 contacts. Dragged it onto Contacts and everything imported. Ten years of numbers back.