I need some wisdom. I just did a clean install of lion on my iMac. I backed up leopard via time machine before the clean install of lion and now I can't figure out how to get my address book contacts imported to lion. Any advice is appreciated.
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Leopard to Lion Contacts
- Thread starter Cramerism
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r0k
macrumors 68040
They really should have come back when you migrated from your old TM backup. You did migrate, right?
i used migration assistant after the install but they didn't update. When i try to manually access them they don't copy because the old contacts were in a older version of address book.
r0k
macrumors 68040
Hmmmm...
I went looking for my address book data and it was sitting in...
~/Library/Application Support/AddressBook/Sources/{lots of hexadecimal crap}/AddressBook-v22.abcddb
I looked in "Time Machine Backups" and browsed to backups.backupdb. I opened the file and looked inside for a recent data. I picked 2011-11-26. Once inside I opened Macintosh HD/users/{me}/Library/Application Support/AddressBook/Sources/{same hex gibberish}/AddressBook-v22.abcddb
In your case, it will probably say AddressBook-v21 or something. Option click that file, pick copy and paste it somewhere you can get to it later. Then see if Address can "import" from that file.
You definitely don't want to use the Time Machine app to restore this file as it will overwrite your empty but good one. You want to go behind Time Machine's back and copy the file somewhere you can use it to try to "import" your contacts.
While you are in there, be careful and CHANGE NOTHING, only copy what you need! When you are done, eject the Time Machine Backups.
hope this helps...
Thanks for the advice. I found the file address book-v22.abcddb and saved that file. I also saved the whole address book file. When I try to import, the files I try to grab are ghosted. When I search for the files not during an import I can click but a blank vcard comes up. Seems harder than it should be.
I ended up option clicking the cards and that were saved in the metadata folder in the address book folder and got the info. It takes a while but at least the contacts were not lost forever. I appreciate all the advice.
r0k
macrumors 68040
Glad you get everything back! Sorry to hear it was so much work. In the future, back up address book from time to time. I would expect you could import an address book backup if this ever happened again. Make sure you aren't simply exporting the current contact as a vcard. You can then put your backup .vcf or .abbu file on dropbox so you have it backed up off site (if you're not already taking advantage of iCloud to back things up off site).