After Lion upgrade, my addressbook does not work++

Thanks, it worked. All I did was uncheck and recheck contants. Hope the fix lasts.

Thanks much on the helpful answer!

Thanks a lot, finally sorted

Great Barney! thank you a lot!

I tried Barney's solution which didn't help me. But in navigating to LibrariesApplication support/Address Book

I did find a zipped file called migration*******.tbz

I unzipped that file which gavve me a migration*******.abbu file

double clicking on that opened addressbook and added all my pre Lion contacts back into address book without the junk that got created during my many attempts to syn with i@%$@^@CLOUD.

I am happier.

The fix from Barney works like a charm. Just a corrupted file.

Thanks Barney!

Your fix works like a charm. Thanks for posting.

Great fix for me (who just downloaded Lion from the App store to upgrade a Snow Leopard 5-year-old Macbook Pro. Thank-you.

Syncing is the most hairy part of the whole experience huh? I'm really not sure whether we (who have decided to shell out for the Apple promise of an easier computing life) have started to expect too much or if Apple need to boot their own behind.

Or somewhere between the two?

The actual filename to be deleted in my case was:

Application Support > AddressBook > AddressBook-v22.abcddb.

I also spent a few seconds wondering which was the Option key, as mine is just called "alt ⌥"

From the beginning (1984), it has been the Option key. When Apple started selling outside the US, they started adding alt to the key. At some point, they dropped Opt altogether from the international keyboards.

The actual filename to be deleted in my case was:

Application Support > AddressBook > AddressBook-v22.abcddb.

Oops. Wish I could edit that.

This worked for me (and I think is what Barney means by desyncing address book)

1. Go to system preferences and select icloud

2. Deselect contacts from icloud sync (you can choose to keep or not keep contacts locally, I dont think it makes any difference)

3. Wait a minute or so

4. Now, select sync of contacts again

It should now work perfectly.

(Just added this to clarify a bit about Barneys first post)

SimonC

Hi. Was looking promising but it didn't work and a new file appeared in the Library with a similar name. Any ideas? Thanks.

Rich C Marsh wrote:

Hi. Was looking promising but it didn't work and a new file appeared in the Library with a similar name. Any ideas? Thanks.

It is supposed to recreate itself. That is the index file that is used to display the information in the Address Book. It occasionally gets corrupted and won't display or update correctly. Deleting it causes Address Book to rebuild the index from the vCards stored in the metadata folder.

If you've got the data backed up, you can delete everything in the addressBook folder and start over. Import your contacts back into an empty Address Book and see if it works ok.

Thanks for this. I tried it too but though I delete the whole file, when I go to empty trash it says that the file addressbook-v22.abcddb is in use and won't delete, even though there are no applications running. When I restart the computer the file is back in place in library. How can I get rid of it?

I'd be very grateful for any suggestions.

Try this handy little app when the Trash won't empty or if you have big files that will take a long time to empty.

http://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/8214/trash-it!

You don't need to get rid of it. It is required to index the vCard data. Deleting it causes AddressBook to recreate the index, hopefully making it work correctly in the process.