A Hawk Wings reader emailed me today with a depressing tale.

The Address Book had been wiped from her (or his) PowerBook, smartphone and .Mac account after syncing the Powerbook with a Nokia 6682, except for three contacts recently added through the new .Mac interface.

A rather weird email exchange with .Mac support followed, before a fix was found independently.

The names of the reader and the .Mac support person and the support ticket numbers have been removed.

The Hawk Wings reader contacted .Mac support:

Hello,

I recently sync’ed my .Mac account with my Address Book on my PowerBook G4, and all my contacts were erased, but for the three I had recently added via the .Mac website.

I can be contacted by email at Xxxxxxx@mac.com or by phone at x xxx xxx xxxx. Please let me know ASAP how to fix this, as this is a very, very serious problem, with heavy consequences for me.

Thank you
Xxxxx X Xxxxxxx

.Mac response:

Dear Xxxxxxx,

Thank you for contacting Apple and the .Mac Support Team. Based on the information provided in your email, I understand that your Address Book contacts disappeared after syncing with .Mac.

I’m sorry to hear that some of your data is missing, but data lost through .Mac Sync cannot be recovered.

.Mac Syncing is not designed to back up data, such as Address Book contacts or Safari Bookmarks. I recommend using an application designed specifically for data backup, such as .Mac’s Backup.

Backup allows you to automatically save photos, family movies, your favorite music, and other important documents to your iDisk, a CD, a DVD, or an external hard disk. This will lessen the possibility of losing any important messages or data in the future.

You can also save your important files to CD, DVD, or other removable media using Mac OS X instead of Backup, as described in these articles:

Mac OS X: How to back up and restore your files

How to back up and restore your important Mac OS X 10.4 files

Sincerely,

Xxxxxxx
.Mac Support

Puzzled, another attempt is made:

Let me clarify: I know .Mac syncing is not design to back up data. But I don’t think it’s designed to erase it, is it?

I do not sync my Address Book with my .Mac account and my cell phone in order to back it up. I do it, just as most of your customers, in order to be able to use the same contact info on my Mac at home, on my PC at work and on my smartphone on the go.

This “glitch” has caused an extremely severe damage to the personal use I make of .Mac, as well as to my professional practice. That is why I very strongly encourage Apple to make sure this never happens again to me, or to any other .Mac subscriber. This is an advice I am giving both as a faithful Apple customer and as an attorney at law.

Should this happen again, not only would I lose any confidence in Apple’s .Mac service — I would also probably consider seeking reparation.

Cordially,
Xxxxxx X Xxxxxxx

.Mac Support replies:

Dear Xxxxxxx,

I apologize for any inconvenience that this issue might have caused. Based on the information in your latest email, it appears you might be using iSync rather than .Mac Sync.

I have forwarded your report to a .Mac Support specialist for assistance. After the matter has been investigated, a .Mac Support representative will respond to you with additional information.

I’m sorry for the inconvenience, and I appreciate your patience as we work to make your experience with .Mac more enjoyable.

Sincerely,

Xxxxxx
.Mac Support

Fortunately, the reader did not have to rely on .Mac support in the end.

The solution, using Address Book’s AddressBook.data.previous backup, emerged in a forum thread he started, basically following this macOSXHint tip for restoring lost contacts.

[Thanks, Xxxxxx]

Related posts

• Update: Plugin and addon list, links
• SyncTogether: Syncing without .Mac
• MySync 0.78b: .Mac syncing without the .Mac
• .Mac still value for money?
• Take Control of .Mac released

I hate to go on endlessly about Fastmail , but how sweet is this announcement today?!

All users email is now on replicated servers. This means that every email delivered or deleted and every email action performed is replicated within a second to a completely separate server with a completely separate copy of all users emails.

We now have at least three levels of redundancy, three copies of every email, and all those copies are on RAID redundant storage themselves.

1. All users now have their email stored on a system with RAID disks and all servers and RAID arrays have dual power supplies. This means a single drive or power supply failure should cause no interruption to service at all, we just replace the drive/power supply while the system is live and online…
2. All users now have their email replicated to an identical replica system (RAID drives, dual power supplies, etc). Each system is completely separate…. The replication is performed at the semantic email level, not at the filesystem level. So a filesystem corruption on the source server will not be replicated. This means if there is a disk or filesystem corruption on a single machine, we can just switch to the replica…
3. All users have their email store backed up incrementally each night to a separate system and RAID array. The backups of email are kept for 1 week after the email is deleted to allow restoring in case of accident. In an emergency situation if both a master and replica server should fail catastrophically, we can still perform a restore from this backup…

[Full text ]

Related posts

• Python script to backup an IMAP Account
• Fastmail vs. Gmail
• Backing up an IMAP account in Thunderbird
• Using your Mac as a mail server
• Using Mail.app to archive Gmail

A poster on macOSXHints provides an applescipt which will backup the data files from iCal, Address Book and Delicious Library as well as bookmarks from Camino and del.icio.us.

It’s useful as it is, especially if you use those apps, but the poster also hopes that readers will “glean parts that are relevant to your system/apps or adapt the whole thing or even add to it”.

If you are a beginner at AppleScript (like me) you will be interested to see the section for the del.icio.us bookmarks, which shows how AppleScript can tab through the fields of a web page.

The poster wrote this script after “a few frustrating losses of data”. A warning to us all.

Related posts

• Plugin and addon list updates
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• Weekly Update
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In the hunt for a solid, comprehensive backup solution for his IMAP accounts, Rui Carmo (Tao of Mac) has produced a python script that will copy all the emails from an IMAP account, do it all as safely as possible and generate mbox-formatted files that can be imported into Mail.app and is completely and utterly free.

You can’t ask for more than that!

Not being very smart about these things, I asked him why he didn’t just copy Mail.app’s local caches. He set me straight:

Well, the caches aren’t portable, aren’t in a standardized format, are not guaranteed to be complete (remember the Preferences: you may or may not cache messages, and even then you’re only sure of those you actually downloaded), and they don’t necessarily store the original message contents as they arrived to your server.

Not only that, doing it this way makes the backup useful for people whatever mail client they use.

He hopes to wrap the whole thing in a shiny GUI soon, but for the moment it’s command-line only.

Rui is looking for feedback and testers to help improve the script even more. You can get the script and leave your helpful comments on his web site .

[Thanks to Jacob Rus for the "aquafied" Python image. Check out more nice Mac-friendly icons from Python's future at his web site ]

Related posts

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Maza Digital has re-released its Email Backup app as a shareware app called Email Backup Pro.

It offers a simple schedule for the complete backup of messages and settings in Apple Mail, Thunderbird, Eudora and MS Entourage X and 2004. The shareware version adds a restore option and comes with an optional add-on to manage backups on external harddrives.

The interface clearly presents options for the location and timing of the backups and the number of backup to save:

If you want to save your backups to an external drive that is not always connected, an additional freeware app Email Backup On Mount is provided.

It watches for the mounting on the remote drive and prompts you to do a backup when it is connected. It also offers menubar access to Email Backup Pro’s main features.

The backups are compressed as zip files with the date of the backup and the extension .ebp, which helps with subsequent identification and saves space.

Restoring the backup is as easy as selecting “Restore” from the app’s Tools menu.

Email Backup Pro costs USD 9.95 and a demo version (with scheduling disabled) is available from the developer’s web site .

Documentation is not included in the download, but is available separately.

Related posts

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• Email Backup and Backup Pro updates: GyazMail, better restore
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Over the weekend I updated the Hawk Wings Add-on and Plug-in List.

Ten new entries were added, making a total of 130+ add-ons, plugins, scripts and helpful apps to make working with Mail.app, iCal and Address Book quicker, smarter and more productive:

1. AddressX (Get Exchange contacts in Address Book) was added to the Address Book section.
2. Next Unread Message (Applescript to move to next unread message) was added to the Added Functionality section.
3. Export Address Book (easy merges of Address Book data with Word, FileMaker) was added to the Address Book section.
4. Note to Self (quick notes to yourself in Mail.app à la Leopard Mail) was added to the Added Functionality section.
5. Email Backup (quick, one-step back up for mail.app, thunderbird and more) was added to the Archiving section.
6. OMiC (plugin wrapper for tnef.sourceforge.net to extract winmail.dat files) was added to the Added Functionality section.
7. Mail to Yojimbo (script to pipe emails from Mail.app to Yojimbo) was added to the Integration with other apps section.
8. Mail Unread Menu (discreet menubar notification for Mail.app) was added to the Notification section.
9. Return Receipts AppleScript (request return receipts from email clients that support them) was added to the Added Functionality section.
10. MailPod (script to copy emails to any iPod) was added to the Added Functionality section.

Related posts

• Update: Plugin and addon list, links
• Plugin List update: 11 new entries
• Plugin List adds 122 Leopard Mail Templates
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