Address Book Contacts Lost

[kgrass]

Hello,

I have lost all of my address book contacts. I have done a search for AddressBook.data and can't find any files. There are only two variables I can name that may be at fault. One, I deleted the Address Book widget from my Dashboard the other day. Two, I installed Snow Leopard on Friday.

Any ideas of how I can find my lost data? I went into my Time Machine and I can't seem to find it, even in past copies.

Help!

Thanks,

Karl

 

[kgrass]

Contacts lost - getting weirder

OK - this is really getting weird. I went back into Time Machine again and suddenly there were records there from earlier in the day (when a few minutes earlier there was nothing - even going back months.) The alphabetizing had changed but there were there. So I went out of TM to my current files and, sure enough, they were back - with the same odd alphabetizing. The app then closed unexpectantly - to use Apple's terminology - and I rebooted. Guess what - they were gone again! Now I can't open any past files in TM.

I just heard from my wife and she is experience issues with Apple Mail since we installed Snow Leopard. Anyone else having odd issues like this or know what to do?

Thanks,

Karl

 

[devburke]

OK - this is really getting weird. I went back into Time Machine again and suddenly there were records there from earlier in the day (when a few minutes earlier there was nothing - even going back months.) The alphabetizing had changed but there were there. So I went out of TM to my current files and, sure enough, they were back - with the same odd alphabetizing. The app then closed unexpectantly - to use Apple's terminology - and I rebooted. Guess what - they were gone again! Now I can't open any past files in TM.

I just heard from my wife and she is experience issues with Apple Mail since we installed Snow Leopard. Anyone else having odd issues like this or know what to do?

Thanks,

Karl

I did a clean install and restored from an Address Book Archive, so my issue was probably different from yours. For me, it imported the groups but there didn’t appear to be any contacts. I solved this by quitting AB, Spotlighting one of my contacts (they all showed up through Spotlight) and when I opened the contact in AB, there they all were, and it’s worked ever since.

 

[kgrass]

Spotlight not an answer

Thanks for the reply but using spotlight to find a contact isn't yielding any results.

Karl

 

[redgaz26]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 3_0_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/528.18 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Mobile/7A400 Safari/528.16)

I had something similar. Do you have an iPhone with your contacts on? If so your in luck. I synced all my contacts off my iPhone back into the address book.

 

[kgrass]

Snow Leopard creating issues

Thanks for the iPhone suggestion but I do not have one. I suspect this is Snow Leopard issue as sometimes the files are recognized in TM and sometimes they are not and sometimes they show up currently but usually not. My theory is the that the files are there but something about Snow Leopard is creating a situation where it does not "see" the files. Don't know why or how but there seem to be plenty of SL related issues on the Apple support site - mostly with eMail and Time Machine.

Best advice - wait before installing Snow Leopard - Apple seems to have misjudged the quality or made a poor decision releasing it early to try to take some Ooomph out of Microsoft's announcement.

 

[kgrass]

Finally fixed

After more than 5 hours of phone and trouble-shooting time with Apple Care my contacts are back. I cannot tell you what exactly allowed the Time Machine and Address Book issues to be resolved as there were so many countless things attempted. Ultimately there was a full reinstall of SL involved (I can't imagine why that wasn't one of the first items tried). While this seems to have had an impact it also regenerated my TM issue which had previously been fixed.

Final word - don't install SL until the patch comes out!

 

[John Sterlin]

Leopard aparently deleated my contacts

I'm having a similar experience. After the Leopard install, I received a sync message that asked me to choose between three choices of the same contact, oddly, all three appeared to be exactly the same. I chose the contact on the far left. I thought it was strange but I went about my business. Later that day, I went to use my iphone and all my contacts were gone. I went back and checked contacts in my macbook pro and all 600 were gone. Unfortunately since I sync with mobile me it wiped contacts on my iphone and mobleme.

I use Time Machine so I thought I could just open contacts, go back a few days before the Leopard install and restore... no such luck, the contacts appear blank in all my backups all the way back a year.

When time machine didn't work using address book, I thought I could go back using finder and bring the addressbook.data and addressbook.previous files forward. Again, no such luck... still blank. But, I discovered that the file size of those files from just days before the leopard install and now are the same. I believe that this might mean that the contacts are there, I just can see them with the Leopard version of Address Book.

Any help would be appreciated, I don't have 5 hours to spend on the phone with Apple Support. I'm at a loss as to know what to do next.

 

[TorontoAllan]

Address Book lost after Snow Leopard

I have had a similar problem. All my Address Book contacts, including the Apple Computer Card and the Self card, disappeared after upgrading to Snow Leopard.

The app is empty, and will become unresponsive if left long enough. Moreover, it will cause Safari to become unresponsive after a few minutes too, though after force quitting Address Book, Safari will go unred and become immediately responsive again.

I can find references to cards in my Address Book via Spotlight, but selecting them does not enable Address Book to find or open them. This seems like it might be a major bug in Snow Leopard if it is happening across a number of people's systems.

 

[selcuk]

Address Book and .me account

This is slightly related: I opened my address book to find that there is only one contact left in it, the noreply@googlemail.com address, which I presume happened when I logged on to Google Groups last week. Now I have the address book on my .me account, and want to back that up and make it sync with my Mac Address book to restore the addresses, but I am fearful that something will wipe those too. Any ideas on:

How to back up the address book from .me account
How to get these addresses from the .me account to my Mac.

Ps I am not operating Snow Leopard.

Thanks

Selcuk

 

[kgrass]

Time Machine backup for AddressBook Contacts

For all those who have had the TM issue of blank records when attempting to restore AddressBook contacts: If you haven't already done this, try closing TM and then re-entering - for some reason the blank records would re-appear the second time. If that doesn't work I am afraid it is time to call Apple Care.

 

[Pooldraft]

Address Book Disappearance

Ok, I have a similar problem. I went to go look at my address book and nothing was there, not even my card. So, I tried to open up the back up but there is no addressbook.data or the backup of it in the library/application support/addressbook folder. I can however find my contacts through spotlight but when I go to open them up all I get is a blank screen in AB. When I look for them using the widget I can find all of them and display them in the widget but still not in AB. When I go into AB and try to just add the contacts that I have stored as a .vfc it asks if I want to import the duplicates, weird. Anyone have any ideas. I have deleted the configuration.plist in the library/application support/addressbook folder but no luck are there any other preference files or is my database just corrupt .