Comments on: How to recover missing Address Book data

By: Tim Gaden

Tim Gaden — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 10:01:22 +0000

Thanks for letting me know. It always nice to feel a post is useful!

By: Erika

Erika — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 08:12:44 +0000

Thank you so much! I got it all back just in time for Christmas cards. FHEW!

By: Damian

Damian — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 04:32:32 +0000

You guys are freaking Awesome! Much Thanks! ..

I just recovered all of my contacts!

I am using snow leopard and so it seams the files names a little different but in essence the steps are the same, you can recognized which is the backup file by the date it was created on.

Thanks!

By: Vangie Lacuesta

Vangie Lacuesta — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 07:23:51 +0000

I can’t retrieve my address book anymore at my apple .. can you show how to restore it on the desktop.

By: Kim

Kim — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 10:04:59 +0000

If your address book is still empty after trying the above, repeat the process except with AddressBook.data.beforesave. That worked for me fortunately. And I backed up my address book immediately upon reopening and finding my contacts there.

By: conrd Koffler

conrd Koffler — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 04:18:09 +0000

Can find my names & address book of names & addressess 2007-2w008

By: kilimba

kilimba — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 21:24:38 +0000

The File: AddressBook.data.previous opens up as an unreadable text file. Would appreciate help in knowing how to retrieve this data!

By: Michael

Michael — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 03:33:12 +0000

This seems like a great option but I have one dilemma. I wake up every morning and re-sync my iPhone for podcasts, not realizing that my roommates phone had tried to sync to my computer the night before. This forced my address book to delete and now the .previous file is empty too. Is there any way to solve this?

By: skelly

skelly — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 17:23:52 +0000

all good stuff as usual Hawkwings. I have a slight oddity to add to this scenario. My Address Book shows all my contacts but when I backup from the file menu or manually copying the Address Book folder in Library/App Support I only get a portion of my contacts backed up. I don’t understand why about 12 contacts simply aren’t included – has me baffled!
If anyone can shed light on this I’d be hugely grateful.

By: Paul G

Paul G — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 16:48:51 +0000

Hello

I want to add my experience to this forum. If you are like me and have tried to do the above mentioned trick and it didn’t work, you may see as I did the big file (mine was 21 mbtes) AddressBook.data

If it is too corrupt to work again. Mine was. Don’t throw it away since it is possible to drag it onto the TextEdit application and to make a Find for certain info which you may remember part of like someone’s email address for example. It’s a good idea to drag this file out and keep it just in case there is something you need to find.

Luckily (since I back up my files) I had only to go back 1 month to get a backup of my address book. It’s times like these that you know why you do it.

To suffer a complete corruption of an address book on a PowerMac is just not acceptable. I am on 10.4.11

If anyone from Apple read this.. Take it from me, it was a BAD thing to have happen. Could have been much worse though if I hadn’t got a backup.