iSync data recovery

[sketchycat]

I have a Nokia N70, and through an iSync plug-in regularly back up my phone's contact data onto my Powerbook, having experienced several phonebook losses. I was pleased to be able to do this so simply through iSync.

However, this morning I was playing around with my widgets, and upon opening the address book widget for the first time, found my address book empty.

Syncing, to rewrite the data into address book, isync warned me about the 190 odd contacts that would be deleted from my computer, not my N70. safe in the knowledge that the contacts were securely on my phone, i hit ok, aware that something was wrong, but not that it was going to delete all my contacts from my phone!

i have read the thread about recovering address book - however, this didn't work - because i had already restarted it several times prior to checking things out, hoping my contacts would re-emerge before they ALL got lost.

the only thing i can think of is if from the isync log, where it tells me that, yes, 266 of my contacts have been safely deleted from my phone. is there a physical backup of this log, the data reference point for an undo command? of course, the undo option in isync is blanked out...

else i could recover the data from the mmc card on my phone - but it's not exactly worth sending it off and paying megabucks for it. if some software could recover it from my mac for free... that'd be ace. but methinks my chances of that are slim-to-none.

please help... i can't face the nightmare again...

 

[yellow]

have you simply opened the Addressbook application, rather than relying on the widget?

 

[sketchycat]

widget

yeah, i ditched the widget as soon as i first opened it and realised what it had done.

 

[yellow]

I don't know anything about the syncing with the nokia, but don't you have a backup of your computer/home directory that would have your addressbook info?

 

[sketchycat]

Addressbook data?

er.... that would have been very sensible, yes, good suggestion.

but no, i just have a mirror of music, films, documents as backup.

now i (and everybody else should) know. back up your application data.

the old addege of 'store your data in 3 places' rings true, exemplified here. you learn the hard way, i guess.


the issue has been partially solved because i have all my sms' from the last 3 months, stamped with the names, and have manually gone through them, pressed call & hung up quickly (because the 'add to contacts' option is not available) & added to contacts from the recently dialed list. 90 times. phew. better than nothing though. you get into the rhythm after about 5 minutes.

i would still like the rest back if anybody does know whether this data (undo data? log detail?) is encoded in any of the addressbook files.

perhaps worth a line or two to apple for the next version of isync to have idiot-proof undo? like by saving a backup of whatever it deletes until you quit the app? pretty easy, non?

thanks
an idiot

 

[yellow]

for future reference, the address book data is stored in /Users/your_username/Library/Application Support/AddressBook/

 

[mkrishnan]

Okay, this is a DANGEROUS SUGGESTION™, so be careful.

Look in ~/Library/Application Support/AddressBook as previously mentioned.

I have several files, including these two:

Addressbook.data
Addressbook.data.previous

Both are large files (several megs), which is consistent with the ~550 people I have in Address Book. I think the date of the latter file is consistent with the last time I ran an iSync. See if you also have both of these files.

Here's the dangerous suggestion part.

Quit Address Book.
Make a COPY OF THIS ENTIRE FOLDER somewhere else.
In the original location (NOT in the copy folder), delete Addressbook.data
Rename Addressbook.data.previous Addressbook.data
Launch Address Book and see if this restores your contacts.

Good luck.

 

[yellow]

This one's for you Mo.

!!

 

[mkrishnan]

The only thing that doesn't quite make sense is that I just changed a contact I needed to change for other reasons, and then ran an iSync, and that .previous file did not appear to get rotated to the previous iteration. So I'm not sure what the circumstances are that cause it to be created. The weird thing too is that it's larger than the current .data file -- 5MB vs 3.9MB.

I'd be really interested to know whether this DANGEROUS SUGGESTION™ works. And if it does, there will definitely be an Oh, Snap from me. No, doy!