Recover corrupted Address Book data
A poster with the delightful username wackazong has posted a long and complicated tip 
on macOSXHints for recovering corrupted Address Book data.
He used Address Book Exporter and his own applescript to restore 99% of a friend’s 2,000 contacts. Impressive.
His applescript appends group data to each contact that is otherwise lost by Address Book Exporter in the retrieval process.
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Tags: Address Book, applescript, contacts, corrupt data, recovering
March 22nd, 2006 at 5:06 am
There’s also a quick fix if you can, but that depends on if the file is there.
Address Book by default makes a little backup of itself before you start updating files. So if you go into:
Users > (your user) > Library > Application Support > Address Book
You’ll see two files:
AddressBook.data
AddressBook.data.previous
If data is corrupted, trash it, and rename the previous one to just say .data instead of .data.previous
Voila, you have your old addresses since the last time you updated. Now if you haven’t updated in a while, you’re in trouble:)
Regardless, always backup your data, SuperDuper is an excellent program to do this!