HELP!
This problem has happened to me on MORE than one occasion, and is now starting to happen VERY frequently!
Quite some time ago, I was working in Address Book when the program unexpectedly quit. When I started the program back up, ALL OF MY CONTACTS WERE MISSING!!
There were only two contacts left, one for Apple Computers, and one generic contact for myself with just my basic info.
At the time, I assumed this problem had something to do with Plaxo, as I got a strange pop-up from Plaxo when I had restarted my computer. I forget what the pop-up said exactly, but it was something along the lines of "Reset for Merge with Plaxo?" and my only two choices were either [Delete All] or [Continue]. I didn't dare select either of these options as they both sounded ominous. I didn't want to delete my address book, nor did I want to reset anything for the sake of Plaxo, which I wasn't really using in the first place.
Long story short, my entire address book got wiped out and I was left with only those two familiar contacts, myself and Apple Computers.
Somehow my Address Book restored itself automatically. Unfortunately, when it did, even though I had almost all of my original contacts back (I had about 1,500 contacts in all!!!) ALL OF THEM WERE MISSING EMAIL ADDRESSES!!!!!
I have spent the last several months MANUALLY replacing all my email addresses..... ONE...... AT..... A...... TIME!!!!!!
Most especially, I have devoted this entire past week to this task. By this I mean I have literally sat in front of my computer, scouring my Mail app, my chat clients, facebook, and the depths of my memory for anything that could help me recover email addresses and other missing information for the now 1,756 contacts in my Address Book.
After about 5 days of faithfully updating my Address Book, and backing it up after every thirty minutes or so.... THE SAME THING HAPPENED AGAIN just a few days ago!!!
After spending the whole week re-populating my address book, it closed itself and to my horror, I was back where I started when I re-opened it!
I tried calling Apple but of course, there is no such thing yet as 24 hour tech support by phone (unbeLIEVABLE considering I PAY year-round for this tech support!) I thought I would have to fix the problem myself.
First, I tried simply restoring my Address Book from the most recent backup. However when I selected the backup file and clicked to restore, nothing happened. I got a little screen flash to indicate that some action had taken place, but that was it. I was left starting at an empty Address Book, empty except for two contacts: Myself and Apple Computers.
I double checked my MobileMe account and thankfully, all my contacts were still there. But now I was terrified that when my computer automatically synchronized with my .Mac account, that these contacts would get deleted from MobileMe as well!!!
I even got a Sync warning, letting me know that Syncing with my Address Book would change two of my contacts, and DELETE 1,754 of them.
I CLICKED ON CANCEL. Of course I did NOT want to delete ANYTHING further!
I'm not sure what happened next, but somehow when I next tried to open my Address Book, there they all were, just like nothing ever happened.
My entire Address Book was restored more or less to it's original condition before the last crash, missing perhaps the last several items I had updated before the crash.
However, I noticed one other thing which really irritates me... Some, but not all of my groups were destroyed!!! I still have all the listings for my Groups and Smart Groups -- but a Group containing my entire client list is suddenly EMPTY!
Until now, the only way I had to distinguish my nearly 400 private clients from the other 1300+ contacts is that I had oh-so-carefully added each of them painstakingly to my Client group over time.
Well I got over that scare and was thankful to see that at least my contacts were preserved WITH their email addresses this time.
And then the same thing happened tonight!!!!!
I was adding the name of a city to one of my contacts. Then I attempted to create a new group to add her card and a few others to.
Upon creating the new group, I was waiting for the application to allow me to rename that New Group -- and before I got the chance, the entire application unexpectedly quit on my AGAIN!!!
I was again horrified and discouraged when I opened the Address Book program to find that I was missing ALL but two contacts (you guessed it... Myself & Apple Computers).
At least this time around I knew that pretty much all I had to do was wait around and they would come back. I had to tell my computer NOT to delete the contacts to Sync with my Address Book. I had to quit the address book and restart it a few times. I had to restart. I had to try a few things. But soon enough, within maybe 10 or 15 minutes, I opened my address book and there were all my original contacts again. Thank God, all the email addresses were still in contact this time.
However..... even though I spent time carefully restoring all those clients to my Clients Group -- GUESS WHAT!!! THE ENTIRE GROUP IS EMPTY AGAIN!!!!!
The OTHER groups are not empty!!! JUST THE ONE THAT IS MOST IMPORTANT TO ME!!!
I am running OS X Tiget (10.4.11) on a Mac Mini with a 1.66 GHz Intel Core Duo processor, and 2 GB of Memory at 667 MHz DDR2 SDRAM, with a startub disk of 120GB. Of the total disk space, I have 18.35GB still available on my main hard drive.
I have no idea why this should not be working, or why I am experiencing SO many problems.
I was born and raised a Mac user, and have been defending them to the death, claiming they are the most stable platform out there.
I am beginning to wonder what I've been fighting for?! Why I am defending a computer company that is taking years off my life span due to premature aging from computer related stress.
I am a self-employed freelance photographer and I work from home. I just cannot afford to have my Address Book obliterated one more time. I have had my fill of guessing games and playing roulette with my computer every time I use it.
I am alarmed at the lack of support out there, and the inability to find anything that accurately represents problems similar to the ones I am experiencing.
Any help out there?!?!?!?
I have already decided, this time around rather than simply adding my important client contacts to a Group and hoping they'll still be there in the morning, I am going to add the words "GROUP: PERSONAL CLIENT" to each and every contact in that category so that I can use a SMART GROUP to group together any and all clients in that category.
This should prove even more useful in the first place, as to my utter shock, Smart Groups do not allow me to find contacts based on which Groups they may already belong to... So if I want to cross reference "CLIENTS" who "HAVE NOT YET PAID" who "ARE MORE THAN ONE YEAR OLD", I can't just do so by creating a SMART GROUP to find any contacts belonging to all three of these groups... I will HAVE to stamp such information on each and every individual contact.
Looking for feedback from anybody feeling my pain, as soon as possible!
Thanks much!
Ben Strothmann
(Astoria, NY)
This problem has happened to me on MORE than one occasion, and is now starting to happen VERY frequently!
Quite some time ago, I was working in Address Book when the program unexpectedly quit. When I started the program back up, ALL OF MY CONTACTS WERE MISSING!!
There were only two contacts left, one for Apple Computers, and one generic contact for myself with just my basic info.
At the time, I assumed this problem had something to do with Plaxo, as I got a strange pop-up from Plaxo when I had restarted my computer. I forget what the pop-up said exactly, but it was something along the lines of "Reset for Merge with Plaxo?" and my only two choices were either [Delete All] or [Continue]. I didn't dare select either of these options as they both sounded ominous. I didn't want to delete my address book, nor did I want to reset anything for the sake of Plaxo, which I wasn't really using in the first place.
Long story short, my entire address book got wiped out and I was left with only those two familiar contacts, myself and Apple Computers.
Somehow my Address Book restored itself automatically. Unfortunately, when it did, even though I had almost all of my original contacts back (I had about 1,500 contacts in all!!!) ALL OF THEM WERE MISSING EMAIL ADDRESSES!!!!!
I have spent the last several months MANUALLY replacing all my email addresses..... ONE...... AT..... A...... TIME!!!!!!
Most especially, I have devoted this entire past week to this task. By this I mean I have literally sat in front of my computer, scouring my Mail app, my chat clients, facebook, and the depths of my memory for anything that could help me recover email addresses and other missing information for the now 1,756 contacts in my Address Book.
After about 5 days of faithfully updating my Address Book, and backing it up after every thirty minutes or so.... THE SAME THING HAPPENED AGAIN just a few days ago!!!
After spending the whole week re-populating my address book, it closed itself and to my horror, I was back where I started when I re-opened it!
I tried calling Apple but of course, there is no such thing yet as 24 hour tech support by phone (unbeLIEVABLE considering I PAY year-round for this tech support!) I thought I would have to fix the problem myself.
First, I tried simply restoring my Address Book from the most recent backup. However when I selected the backup file and clicked to restore, nothing happened. I got a little screen flash to indicate that some action had taken place, but that was it. I was left starting at an empty Address Book, empty except for two contacts: Myself and Apple Computers.
I double checked my MobileMe account and thankfully, all my contacts were still there. But now I was terrified that when my computer automatically synchronized with my .Mac account, that these contacts would get deleted from MobileMe as well!!!
I even got a Sync warning, letting me know that Syncing with my Address Book would change two of my contacts, and DELETE 1,754 of them.
I CLICKED ON CANCEL. Of course I did NOT want to delete ANYTHING further!
I'm not sure what happened next, but somehow when I next tried to open my Address Book, there they all were, just like nothing ever happened.
My entire Address Book was restored more or less to it's original condition before the last crash, missing perhaps the last several items I had updated before the crash.
However, I noticed one other thing which really irritates me... Some, but not all of my groups were destroyed!!! I still have all the listings for my Groups and Smart Groups -- but a Group containing my entire client list is suddenly EMPTY!
Until now, the only way I had to distinguish my nearly 400 private clients from the other 1300+ contacts is that I had oh-so-carefully added each of them painstakingly to my Client group over time.
Well I got over that scare and was thankful to see that at least my contacts were preserved WITH their email addresses this time.
And then the same thing happened tonight!!!!!
I was adding the name of a city to one of my contacts. Then I attempted to create a new group to add her card and a few others to.
Upon creating the new group, I was waiting for the application to allow me to rename that New Group -- and before I got the chance, the entire application unexpectedly quit on my AGAIN!!!
I was again horrified and discouraged when I opened the Address Book program to find that I was missing ALL but two contacts (you guessed it... Myself & Apple Computers).
At least this time around I knew that pretty much all I had to do was wait around and they would come back. I had to tell my computer NOT to delete the contacts to Sync with my Address Book. I had to quit the address book and restart it a few times. I had to restart. I had to try a few things. But soon enough, within maybe 10 or 15 minutes, I opened my address book and there were all my original contacts again. Thank God, all the email addresses were still in contact this time.
However..... even though I spent time carefully restoring all those clients to my Clients Group -- GUESS WHAT!!! THE ENTIRE GROUP IS EMPTY AGAIN!!!!!
The OTHER groups are not empty!!! JUST THE ONE THAT IS MOST IMPORTANT TO ME!!!
I am running OS X Tiget (10.4.11) on a Mac Mini with a 1.66 GHz Intel Core Duo processor, and 2 GB of Memory at 667 MHz DDR2 SDRAM, with a startub disk of 120GB. Of the total disk space, I have 18.35GB still available on my main hard drive.
I have no idea why this should not be working, or why I am experiencing SO many problems.
I was born and raised a Mac user, and have been defending them to the death, claiming they are the most stable platform out there.
I am beginning to wonder what I've been fighting for?! Why I am defending a computer company that is taking years off my life span due to premature aging from computer related stress.
I am a self-employed freelance photographer and I work from home. I just cannot afford to have my Address Book obliterated one more time. I have had my fill of guessing games and playing roulette with my computer every time I use it.
I am alarmed at the lack of support out there, and the inability to find anything that accurately represents problems similar to the ones I am experiencing.
Any help out there?!?!?!?
I have already decided, this time around rather than simply adding my important client contacts to a Group and hoping they'll still be there in the morning, I am going to add the words "GROUP: PERSONAL CLIENT" to each and every contact in that category so that I can use a SMART GROUP to group together any and all clients in that category.
This should prove even more useful in the first place, as to my utter shock, Smart Groups do not allow me to find contacts based on which Groups they may already belong to... So if I want to cross reference "CLIENTS" who "HAVE NOT YET PAID" who "ARE MORE THAN ONE YEAR OLD", I can't just do so by creating a SMART GROUP to find any contacts belonging to all three of these groups... I will HAVE to stamp such information on each and every individual contact.
Looking for feedback from anybody feeling my pain, as soon as possible!
Thanks much!
Ben Strothmann
(Astoria, NY)