address book completely empty!

You don't have a backup CD/HD available, do you? 🙂 Would be the easiest way... (You should always back up your data. Search these boards for instructions.)

Do you see a file called Addressbook.data in /user/Library/Application Support/AddressBook/ ? What's the size of it? Any file called Addressbook.data.previous? Size?

Obviously, you're data wasn't that valuable. Otherwise, you'd be looking for the back up file in user/Library/Application Support/AddressBook/.

I'm not promising anything, yet there's a chance to recover at least part of your address book.

Hi Susan, I had the same problem. Must have been something with Apple .mac (although I haven't seen them admit it), as several people had the same problem. Interestingly, my addresses were still on .mac (go to www.mac.com and look for addres book). There (and only there) you can also reset you sync mechanism. This helped.

Regards,
Konstantin

this has happened to me twice 😟
it's ridiculous

and the second time, i too tried to restore from my .mac account, but the stupid blank address book overwrote the backed up information. total bull

anyway, in the future, the easiest way to back up your address book to a file that won't be modified by syncing or anything, when you have address book open, go to File--> Backup Address Book. Underneath it is the option to revert to a previous backup, should you need to in the future.

When this happened to me, somebody told I could recover some of my data by doing what Scout suggested in his first post. Every month or so, Address Book backs up to the AddressBook.data.previous file in user/library/application support/address book

My Address Book was empty today for no clear reason (My last sygnificant update was 10.4.5 last week). As suggested the situation was remedied by renaming ~/Library/Application Support/AddressBook/AddressBook.data.previous to AddressBook.data (after removing the previous version of AddressBook.data). If this hadn't worked I would have used the conventional backups.

I looked in the AddressBook.data file before removing it. It still had some data in it, but the file was only 2.5 MB long, compared to ~10 MB for the intact version contained in .previous.

The AddressBook.data.previous file appeared to have been created 2 weeks ago, but the file had been updated as of last night. As far as I can tell this restored all my recent address book entry modifications.

Even though the empty address book had sync'd today with .mac, all of the entries were still present via the .mac web interface. However, given some of the warnings in the Address Book discussion threads I figured it was better to try to use the .previous file, than attempt to reset/resync from .Mac.

There is clearly a problem with Address Book in 10.4, however, the fix suggested above appears to remedy the situation rapidly.

Rick

Address book, Mail, and Safari all stopped responding to me at the same time. I restarted the computer, and my address book was empty!

I am soo freaked out.

I tried the suggestions above, but the only file close to what I had was the .backup file from more than 2 years ago. Is there anything else I can do to try and get back my address book from 10 minutes ago?

I have had the same problem since I upgraded to 10.4.5 when I reboot (restart) the address book data will be gone except for a few recent entries. This is very frustrating as it also happens on my backup dupe on an external hard drive. I do not have a .mac account. First time apple support solved the problem by trashing the addressbook.data file (with virtually no data) and renaming the addressbook.data.previous file to addressbook.data. This worked the first time but in subsequent reboots even the .previous file was empty. I resorted to making several copies of my addressbook.data file in the application support folder and locking those copies. So when my address book data is all but wiped out, I unlock a copy and rename it addressbook.data and I have my addressbook back again. It is a pain to have to do this but apple does not seem to be in any hurry to fix this very frustrating problem.

Michael,

while I could certainly name a few issues, where Apple has - unfortunately- not shown any intention to provide a fix, I'm not aware of a general problem with Address Book in 10.4.x.

Is your Address Book data still wiped out whenever you restart your Mac?

Did Apple Care walk you through the standard troubleshooting procedure?
- Make sure you have an up-to-date backup of addressbook.data . (just in case, - though you can't really do much wrong.)

- "Repair disk permissions" and "Repair disk" using Disk Utility (/Applications/Utilities/Disk Utility)

- Log in from your own account and delete the Address Book cache folders:
/Users/your_name/Library/Caches/Address Book/
and /Users/your_name/Library/Caches/com.apple.AddressBook/

- rename or delete the Address Book preference files:
/Users/your_name/Library/Preferences/com.apple.AddressBook.plist
and /Users/your_name/Library/Preferences/com.apple.AddressBook.abd.plist
You might have to adjust your Adress Book settings afterwards, since they will be set to the default state.

- Log in as Administrator, download your favorite system utility (i.e. YASU ) and run the "daily, weekly, monthly cron scripts" as well as "clear system cache" and "clear user cache"

- reinstall the 10.4.5 Combo update from the Apple website.

Restart your Mac and see how it goes.

Good luck!

Looks like another MAJOR bug in OS X. I had the exact same problem. All of a sudden my Address Book was completely empty. The data file was down to 12KB. It seems like awfully poor programming as well to have the entire address book in a single file that is constantly being edited.

I tried the standard troubleshooting with the exception of reinstalling 10.4.5, but to no avail. Had the same problem everyone else had with the backups. Had contacts on my iPod, but when I reconnected they got cleared out. Arg!

The previous data file in the application support folder was also empty and was only 16 KB. There was one called Addressbook.data.beforesave, which had my contacts from 3 months ago, which looks like as well as I'm going to be able to do. The cache folder has a whole bunch of items in it, but I'm not sure whether they're my contacts or not. There are a bunch of vcards in the trash under recovered items, which are a few of my very recently added contacts. Anyone know about the cached files or the vCards in the recovered items?

Looks like I'm screwed. So annoying. You'd think Apple would have done a better job, but, well, they didn't. Other suggestions anyone? I think everyone is pretty screwed here and just has to back up the address book file daily for the future.