URGENT help req. - isync missing ph numbers

[aussiemac86]

My motorola ROKR was recently serviced, and as a consequence all contacts were deleted from the phone memory, no problem i thought, i had them all in address book, and could just sync them back on.

However when I re-paired my phone with my mac and synced, it deleted all of the phone numbers from the contacts in my address book (on my mac),

none of my contacts (in address book) have any phone numbers anymore and it looks like I have lost these. I didnt do an address book back up .... is there anyway i can undo the last import or get these numbers back?


as you can imagine some of these contacts will be extremely hard to get back.

running 10.4.5 on a dual G5 PM

please help

 

[gauchogolfer]

I'm guessing you don't have .Mac syncing, which would solve your problem. If you've not backed up the Address Book, I guess you could try a data recovery program for things that are accidentally deleted (like everyday files), but these tend to be hit-or-miss. There is a thread about it here. Good luck.

 

[aussiemac86]

I'm guessing you don't have .Mac syncing, which would solve your problem. If you've not backed up the Address Book, I guess you could try a data recovery program for things that are accidentally deleted (like everyday files), but these tend to be hit-or-miss. There is a thread about it here. Good luck.

no i dont have .Mac syncing unfortunately.

any other ideas?

 

[gauchogolfer]

no i dont have .Mac syncing unfortunately.

any other ideas?

Did you read the bottom of my post, where I linked to a thread about accidental deletions and how to recover them? There are some options detailed there.

 

[aussiemac86]

Did you read the bottom of my post, where I linked to a thread about accidental deletions and how to recover them? There are some options detailed there.

yeh cheers i did, problem is, i think all the contacts are stored as individual files, and the only free option only allows one 500k file to be recovered.

The only other option is to get the 90USD ones, which is more than i feel the contacts are worth.

im surprised there isnt some "undo last sync" function .

Also surprised that my phone is allowed to delete parts of contacts out of my address book.

 

[gauchogolfer]

Also surprised that my phone is allowed to delete parts of contacts out of my address book.

Under iSync's preferences, there is an option to require permission to make changes to data on your computer. Is yours configured this way?

 

[Eraserhead]

I think there may be a solution, Addressbook appears to keep a backup.

Go to ~/Library/Application Support/ (with ~/ being your home directory)

copy the AddressBook folder to somewhere safe.

open it up

MAKE SURE THE ADDRESS BOOK APPLICATION IS CLOSED

rename the AddressBook.data file to AddressBook.data.old, and then rename the AddressBook.data.previous to AddressBook.data

Hopefully your contacts will be restored!

 

[aussiemac86]

I think there may be a solution, Addressbook appears to keep a backup.

Go to ~/Library/Application Support/ (with ~/ being your home directory)

copy the AddressBook folder to somewhere safe.

open it up

MAKE SURE THE ADDRESS BOOK APPLICATION IS CLOSED

rename the AddressBook.data file to AddressBook.data.old, and then rename the AddressBook.data.previous to AddressBook.data

Hopefully your contacts will be restored!

You are an absolute life saver.....I owe you big time


It worked perfectly

God I love these forums

 

[gauchogolfer]

You are an absolute life saver.....I owe you big time


It worked perfectly

God I love these forums

Good find, Eraserhead. It's nice that AddressBook makes an automatic backup, but it might cause users to get fewer grey hairs if it was more obvious how to access it. Aussiemac86, I'd still make sure that your preferences are setup correctly to avoid this again in the future. I'm glad it worked out for you, though.

MR rules

 

[aussiemac86]

Good find, Eraserhead. It's nice that AddressBook makes an automatic backup, but it might cause users to get fewer grey hairs if it was more obvious how to access it. Aussiemac86, I'd still make sure that your preferences are setup correctly to avoid this again in the future. I'm glad it worked out for you, though.

MR rules

yeh multiple backups have already been made..

I did have the prefs set to warn me, and it did say it was going to "modify" a large proportion of my contacts, alarm bells should have rung, but i didnt think it would be able to delete that info.

anyway, without changing my prefs the sync worked perfectly when I tried again,....might be a bit of a random bug.

 

[Eraserhead]

Good find, Eraserhead. It's nice that AddressBook makes an automatic backup, but it might cause users to get fewer grey hairs if it was more obvious how to access it. Aussiemac86, I'd still make sure that your preferences are setup correctly to avoid this again in the future. I'm glad it worked out for you, though.

MR rules

I'm gonna feedback it to Apple that it should be part of the menus for their next OS.

No problem about the solution!

 

[tangent23]

i've had the same problem with isync erasing files from the imac rather than adding the numbers from address book to the phone [i also had my contacts erased from my phone, buit fortunately had backed up]..

i can't seem to get it to transfer the numbers to my phone..

is this just a bug or am i missing something?

i have done it before and had no problems [i think.. maybe it was always one way phone>imac] so i'm not sure what i'm doing wrong..

any ideas?

the other thing is i have a motorola RAZR V3 so maybe it's a moto issue..