No resolution to deleted address book

[Mutiara]

Hey everyone

My daughter plugged her LG (running Android) into my MacBook Pro and accessed her Yahoo account. All my contacts then transferred over to her yahoo account leaving my address book completely blank.

No matter what I do I cannot get those entries back. I've tried exporting from yahoo, importing into address book, saving from excel files to all sorts of files which are apparently compatible but still nothing. Blank, blank, blank!

I have been through every single suggestion on blog after blog - even deleting all the address book files on my Macbook pro and replacing them with the address book files from my imac (which works) but I still have no address book on my macbook pro (have I overlooked some files??). I have reinstalled, repaired permissions, deleted files, replaced files, checked missing files etc etc and NOTHING works!

I can't even retype the entries as address book won't accept any entries. I've also read that if you try and sync between devices and one has an empty address book it will delete everything from the other device (even though it is supposed to only do what you say) - apparently you need at least one entry for it to work. I don't even have my own entry in the address book.

I've tried everything that's been successful for other people but still no success for me.

I'm on a MacBook Pro running Snow Leopard Mac OS X 10.6.8.

I've just invested in every possible Apple product and am beginning to feel I've made a big mistake if something as simple as this can't be fixed. I'm at my wits' end - the hours I've spent on this are ridiculous.

Thanks!!

 

[pdjudd]

Have you tried doing this from a new user account on your Mac?

 

[Knoodles]

Time Machine?

 

[Knoodles]

The folder you need to go to in Time Machine is users >(you)>Library>Application Support>AddressBook. This folder contains all your contact info. Go to a date before the incident and bring it to the present. Do the same for the address book app. If you don't run Time Machine now you know why you should.
You need to restart for some changes to take effect.

 

[Mutiara]

Yes, I tried a new user account but it made no difference.

Unfortunately my daughter connected her phone before I had set up Time Machine for my MacBook Pro.

I do have Time Machine on my iMac which would have all the contacts - can I use that one on my MacBook Pro? We've been traveling for a year so I've been using my laptop as my main computer. I don't really understand how Time Machine restore works - I'd hate the Time Machine from my iMac to overwrite everything on my laptop (which apart from the Address Book has the most current information).

I tried using my iMac as a great big Time Machine and copied all those Address Book files from my iMac (which are working fine) to my MacBook and restart but that did nothing.

 

[iMacFarlane]

Yes, I tried a new user account but it made no difference.

Unfortunately my daughter connected her phone before I had set up Time Machine for my MacBook Pro.

I do have Time Machine on my iMac which would have all the contacts - can I use that one on my MacBook Pro? We've been traveling for a year so I've been using my laptop as my main computer. I don't really understand how Time Machine restore works - I'd hate the Time Machine from my iMac to overwrite everything on my laptop (which apart from the Address Book has the most current information).

I tried using my iMac as a great big Time Machine and copied all those Address Book files from my iMac (which are working fine) to my MacBook and restart but that did nothing.

Did you mention if you are running Lion on your iMac?

It seems sensible that you should be able to copy all of the contacts from your iMac to your MBP. However, I wouldn't try copying the Contacts App unless the you are running the same OS on both machines. Hopefully Apple didn't fundamentally alter the structure of the contacts database so as to render this method useless. . .

 

[Mutiara]

I'm running Snow Leopard on both machines (10.6.8)

I deleted the Address Book app itself, Address Book Plug-ins from the Library and the Address Book file from Application Support then copied from iMac and put back onto MacBook Pro but still no good. Maybe there are some other files somewhere else that I need to replace also but I can't find what they might be.

As both machines are running the same operating system I can try and use Time Machine from my iMac and only download the Address Book files.

Should I delete the files on my MacBook Pro first or just leave them and overwrite them from Time Machine?

Thanks so much for your help - much appreciated.