Last week, for some reason my copy of Address Book decided to take a dirt-nap. Not sure why… maybe it was the power outage the day before or the numerous new contacts, but for whatever reason I was left with a blank book. Dead. Gone. As you can imagine, I blurted out a few choice words.
Once I finished cursing out my machine, I turned to the magic of Google—hopefully there was a way to recover my lost data. As it turns out, there is a little redundancy built into Address Book. Someone must have guessed it would crap out every once in a while and built in an auto backup to help people recover.
To restore my Address Book data, all I had to do was:
- Quit Address Book
- Go to ~/Library/Application Support/Address Book and delete the file AddressBook.data
- Rename AddressBook.data.previous to AddressBook.data
- Start Address Book
- Do a happy dance (okay, this has nothing to do with actually getting your data back)
That’s it. My Address Book was back, mostly. I did loose about 5–10 contacts, but that was nothing compared to the hundreds I would have lost without this auto-backup.
You might also consider using the free <a href=”http://www.plaxo.com/”>Plaxo</a> service. Great way to have your contacts backed up on a central server. It also integrated with Apple’s Address Book and MS Outlook, so I’m good on any machine I happen to use.
Sorry to be dense, but it is not clear to me exactly which address book you are talking about.
any chance you might send me a brief email?
Thanks!
Mine completely died. I had to sync it with my ipod contacts. I lost some contacts and of course all the photos I attach to contacts. All gone. :(