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Level 1

34 points

Address Book Contacts are Gone

This is a really odd problem that has been going on for sometime now. It first started when I was running Tiger and the problem continues now even with Leopard. The problem is that periodically without warning, all of the contacts in my address book mysteriously disappear - I mean they are gone - deleted. At first, I thought this was an issue with .Mac syncing as I had it set to sync automatically every hour. I have disabled .Mac sync and now only sync manually so I know that it is not an issue with .Mac sync.

Earlier today I checked on my computer and everything was good, all of the contacts were in place. I put in my iPhone and hit sync and left the room. I know for a fact that my iPhone had all my contacts and I know that Address Book had all my contacts. When I came back to the computer a few hours later, Address Book is completely empty - the iPhone has lost all of it's contacts. I logged into .Mac on the internet and all of my contacts are still there. My last sync to .Mac was last night at 7:30. Back when I had .Mac sync set to automatic syncing, it was not uncommon for me to come in and find that all of my contacts would be gone in Address Book and on .Mac as well. I've tried contacting Apple about it and I never received any kind of a response.

Of course I can easily recover everything with my Time Machine backups, but this is perplexing me greatly. How in the heck can this be happening? Is anyone else experiencing anything like this? This is starting to drive me crazy as I cannot figure out how the Address Book is mysteriously losing contacts unless it is happening during the sync process with the iPhone. I would certainly love to hear any suggestions on how to remedy this issue as this is extremely annoying. Thank you.

Mac Pro, Mac OS X (10.5)

Posted on Jan 24, 2008 8:47 PM

39 replies

Gai

Level 1

15 points

Apr 5, 2008 12:16 PM in response to David Ivey

Add me to the list...yesterday my address book wound up completely empty. NO idea how or why. And to top it off, before I did know about it, I synced my iPhone to it and blammo...no more numbers. Help!!!

Apr 11, 2008 6:48 PM in response to Gai

Today I searched in Address Book for a contact I recently added, and it came up "not found". I tried a few other recent entries and could not find them either.

I found this thread that says to use Spotlight to find the entries and it seemed to work:

http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=6712994&#6712994

Message was edited

alexio

Level 1

0 points

Apr 21, 2008 3:28 PM in response to Clif Norrell1

Add me to the list of Addressbookitis sufferers.

Spotlight indeed found the the contacts I was missing.... BUT... I noticed that if I quit & rebooted Address Book, the contacts were still missing.
What to do to keep them there?

--- Simply Edit the new found contacts.
(type a character or delete a space or whatever... )

It's lovely that Spotlight can find the missing contacts, but what is troubling is knowing WHICH and HOW MANY are missing.

Let's just all hope Steve and Apple Employees are also victims of this disease and quickly find a solution. (the only time i've ever wished an illness on anyone...;-)

Apr 23, 2008 1:20 PM in response to alexio

Lost my contacts for a second time. Something is fishy here. I have my Time Machine backup at home and will be able to recover. Someone needs to address this.

Apr 24, 2008 9:16 PM in response to David Ivey

Is there a solution to that problem? My Address Book gets deleted every hour. Its always the file AddressBook-v22.abcddb which gets replaced. Consol message reads

25.04.08 00:19:40 com.apple.launchd[151] ([0x0-0x98098].com.apple.AddressBook.abd[770]) Check-in of Mach service failed. PID 770 is not privileged: com.apple.AddressBook.abd

To isolate I switched Time Machine as well as .mac sync off. Still no improvement. If this would Windows I'd say this looks like a virus.

Any idea?

Rgds

Jan

May 4, 2008 10:08 PM in response to Johannes Zander

Add me to the list... this has happened to me three times now. No warning. Typically I'll notice that the To: in Mac Mail isn't autofilling in anymore and look at Addressbook to find nothing there. poof.

It's worse now, though - since I have an iPhone. I naively thought that syncing my iPhone would restore it - and it gleefully hosed all contacts in there along with pictures taken over many months to add to each contact... all phone numbers lost... no names coming up with SMS messages anymore only meaningless numbers. No nothing, just blown flat away. Highly disappointing to say the least - particularly since I haven't upgraded to Leopard yet so there is no time machine to restore from. Will definitely be upgrading next week.

Also wish there was some option to restore from iPhone - I was under the false sense of security that my iPhone served as a backup for the stuff in (Calendar/Contacts/Music Movies etc.) and vice versa. (it would ask upon sync) - but that doesn't appear to be the case?

May 5, 2008 9:03 AM in response to zeugmatis

Looks to me that the problem lies in sharing address book contacts. I shared my contacts. Now whenever I started address book, I saw in
Activity Monitor that AddressBookManag.app was started shortly thereafter. And that app always deleted the contacts. Then I deleted the share I had, created a new one and that did it for me. Looks like a sync problem. I pretty sure this should work.

rgds

Jan

May 6, 2008 8:15 AM in response to Johannes Zander

I checked my address book pref's and I don't have sharing enabled so that doesn't solve it for me?

May 7, 2008 10:46 PM in response to Llewelyn Roderick

Some addresses in Address Book groups are missing, or the group is empty. I have backup on iDisk accessed by backup program, but Backup crashes while scanning at 21,951 files.

Address are in the Address Book. I can scroll or find them or type name and it pops up in Mail address line.

What I think is screwed up is indexing to the groups. in other words Joe Blow used to show in "friends" but does not, though Joe is still in Address Book.

My mess began after I'd imported 143 addresses by drag & drop from an email to an address group book. That worked. I exported 1,500 addresses and synced with a Blackberry phone using Markspace Missing Sync.

Check and see if your addresses are in the address book, but do not show in the group they were in.
Now to Backup discussion to see why my .Mac service cannot help me.

Jun 2, 2008 8:48 PM in response to Frank Rader

On 3 separate occasions now, I too have suffered the mysterious disappearing Address Book. The last time, it occurred in the middle of the night, when the computer was sitting "idle." Could it be related to Time Machine backups???

Luckily, all 3 times I have been able to restore from a previous TIme Machine backup, but this is a frustrating bug nonetheless. I did not experience the bug until after I upgraded to 10.5.3.

Jun 2, 2008 9:27 PM in response to Karth Vahlnar

Sorry you are having problems -- but...
They may not be lost -- I have had a similar problem, and it appears only the index file was corrupted, which kept the data from displaying correctly.

You may wish to try this:

1. Restart your computer in 'Safe Boot' mode -- hold down the SHIFT key on restart until blue screen
This may take much longer than usual
2. Log into your admin account as usual -- note the red 'safe boot' note on window
3. Use the Disk Utility in applications/utilities folder to REPAIR permissions [be patient]
4. Open Addressbook and confirm it's status -- and under 'file' menu Export > AB Archive
Yeah I know it's supposed to be empty but.... wait
5. CAREFULLY go to directory yourname/library/application support/addressbook
6. Find file 'AddressBook-v22.abcddb' and append '.PREVIOUS' and drag to desktop
7. Look in folder 'Metadata' to confirm data is still there, then back out to finder
8. Reboot machine and log in normally.
9. Launch AddressBook and patiently allow the app to reindex your 'lost' data

Our 5846 very detailed records came back perfectly.

Wisdom from the trenches and hard experience:

1. Make Backups of known good data, keep them handy. Use the export to archive as a lifeline
2. NEVER RUSH DATA ENTRY or SYNC
3. Do not ever force quit Address Book, even when it appears to hang -- let it finish
4. Open Activity Monitor and check CPU and Memory usage, if they are changing -- it's working
5. Patience can save data -- tempers -- and frustration

Please let me know if this helps. Regards, Michael

Jun 10, 2008 8:55 AM in response to Michael Sidoric

My sister is having this problem, all her data is there somewhere (Metadata folder contains all her contacts and spotlight can find the info). I did the steps below and it didn't work.

I'm confused when I get to step 4, why do I do this and what do I do with the export I made?

Is there a way to make the app just recognize the data in the Metadata folder? Or to reimport that data somehow?

David Ivey Author

Level 1

34 points

Jun 25, 2008 9:10 PM in response to David Ivey

This still seems to be unresolved and one that still pops up from time to time. I was able to greatly reduce the number of deletions by turning automatic syncing off my dot mac account. Now I do all of my synching manually and that has helped significantly. I also keep backups of the address book on my hard drive in a safe place and on my iDisk account.

Jul 8, 2008 1:23 PM in response to David Ivey

Has anyone found a solution to this problem? All my contact information is gone, except for the contact emails. Very odd behavior. My correct contact information remains on my iPhone, but I'm afraid of syncing it with my computer for fear of losing everything. Does anyone have a clue if this will happen.

And, my idisk was set to back up my address book contacts but it didn't.

Hope someone has a solution.
DLD

Mulder

Level 6

8,990 points

Jul 8, 2008 2:09 PM in response to MaciSaint

You can restore your contacts from MetaData.

First, you need to enable the Debug menu in Address Book. Quit Address Book, enter this command in Terminal and press Enter:

defaults write com.apple.AddressBook ABShowDebugMenu -bool true

Open Address Book and go to the Debug menu and choose "Revert from MetaData" and wait for it to finish. When it's done, all your contacts should be there, although any pictures you had for contacts may not be there. Immediately make a backup of your Address Book from the File menu and do that every time you make any change to your contacts.

Mulder

Address Book Contacts are Gone