Just deleted all of my address book contacts??

peanutismint

macrumors 6502

Original poster

• Jul 4, 2011

• #1

I spent all day organising my contacts on my iPhone and then wanted to sync them to my Mac's 'Address Book' application, so I deleted all of my contacts on my Mac and then connected my iPhone and hit 'sync'. I did NOT have the 'replace contacts on this iphone' box ticked, to avoid my iphone having its contacts wiped by syncing to an empty address book. However, once it had finished, not only did I still have no contacts in my Mac's address book, I had also lost all of the organised contacts in my iPhone?

Anybody know what went wrong/how to recover from a backup??

 

L

libertysat

macrumors 6502

• Jul 4, 2011

• #2

Do you have Time Machine enabled?

Go back a restore from earlier time
Saved me one time when I wanted to add a note to a contact and instead replaced all rest of my notes for that contact

 

peanutismint

macrumors 6502

Original poster

• Jul 4, 2011

• #3

No I don't use time machine, but I did back up my address book quite recently - I just can't seem to find the file, or find a menu item in address book to restore from backup.....?!

 

J

JediMeister

macrumors 68040

• Jul 4, 2011

• #4

If you had made a backup of your Address Book data, it would have a file extension of .abbu along with a date and timestamp. Check in ~/Documents or ~/Desktop for such a file and double-click to restore.

 

peanutismint

macrumors 6502

Original poster

• Jul 4, 2011

• #5

And just like that - they're all back! Hahah!

Thanks mate. Lifesaver! Will sync them back to my iphone now....