Address Book

Does anyone have a developer account with access to the bug list? I think I heard that it's a known issue.

Noooo!! The same thing has happened to me too. On an iBook G4 running 10.4.7. I was doing absolutely nothing unusual. I'd just added twenty or so new address cards into addressbook, and quit it to do some homework. Open Address Book about two hours later, and everything's gone. This is completely sickening.

Luckily, I have a week-old version of my contacts list on my PDA, so I'm currently trying to copy them back onto my iBook in VCF format. I'm terrified to use iSync, just incase it erases everything on my PDA too. It wouldn't surprise me one bit.

The moral of this tale is obviously... BACKUP EVERYTHING!

I wish everyone else the best of luck in regaining their address cards. Even on a mac, accidents happen.

Thanks 1,000,000 for your suggestion.. it worked for me and I'm eternally grateful! I have over 4,000 cards in AB, and I find it's fairly flaky when dragging names between groups; it wiped 3,000 names but left 1,000-some.

All the best!!

Another victim. Can anyone suggest a good public blog to let the world know about this debacle with Address Book and Apple's total silence on this? People need to know how dangerous and unreliable Address Book is. It is professional malpractice for anyone to use Address Book and it is unacceptable for Apple to continue distributing this application until they fix it.

And another one. While editing in Address Book, it crashed, and upon relaunching it nothing left of the entries. None of the database files in Application Support/AddressBook folder had anything left in them.

APPLE, ARE YOU LISTENING!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

G5 iMac Mac OS X (10.4.7)

Same problem - Total loss of ALL my Address Book data.

Whilst running MailMergApp v1.2 from Objective Labs ( http://www.objectivelabs.com/mailmergeapp.php ) which merges my Address Book with Mail, the merge stopped after a few merges. Upon opening my Address Book - All 3,900 contacts had gone - Absolutely everything.

AddressBook.data - 8Kb

AddressBook.data.beforesave - 12.1 Mb (June 2006)

AdressBook.data.previous - 8Kb

This is totally unacceptable - Anyone any ideas?

P.S. I have used MailMergApp v1.2 from Objective Labs on my previous G4 laptop for a monthly mailing of around 3,500 for a year - Never a problem.

2 x GHz Dual-Core - Intel Xeon Mac OS X (10.4.8) 1 GB 667 MHz DDR2 FB-DIMM

This is a total hack, but before doing any substantial work with AB, I right-click on "AddressBook.data" in the Finder and make a sitx file. I have had excellent results with replacing a destroyed file with the back-up through renaming. I have not had good results with AB's "back-up" function, which often hangs. I, too, am mystified as this behavior is so deplorable, un-Tigerlike and seemingly pervasive.

Good luck!

PB G4 17 inch; TiBook; iMac Mac OS X (10.4.8) 1 gig RAM

Just to follow on from my previous posting above.

I reloaded my address book from the back up file. Loaded perfectly, everything restored. Went and added a few more addresses and all my data dissappeared yet again.

How unstable is that.

Message: Apple please take urgent action now. When a major app is that unstable it's usually on a PC. If I wanted rubbish software, I'd of bought a PC with Windows.



2 x GHz Dual-Core - Intel Xeon Mac OS X (10.4.8) 1 GB 667 MHz DDR2 FB-DIMM

Happened again without doing anything on my new Mac Pro :-/

I think that makes at least 5 times now? I think it's happened on every mac hardware I've encountered 😟

Why the silence from Apple?

There appears to be a lot of comments on the web for example:

http://www.macfixitforums.com/showflat.php?Cat=&Board=Forum36&Number=784065&page =0&view=collapsed&sb=7&o=31&fpart=1

All have the same problem - Total loss of data with no warning.

The issue appears to include versions 10.4.6 - 10.4.8

Come on Apple and sort this Microsoft-like problem!

2 x GHz Dual-Core - Intel Xeon Mac OS X (10.4.8) 1 GB 667 MHz DDR2 FB-DIMM

Me too. I'm surprised everybody here having the same problem...

Interestingly another thread describes exactly the same problem. Whilst the "problem of restoring the data" is resolved, the issue of WHY everything unexpectedly dissappears from the address book data base is not:

http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=3517241

2 x GHz Dual-Core - Intel Xeon Mac OS X (10.4.8) 1 GB 667 MHz DDR2 FB-DIMM

This happened to me too. I came up with stuff from 2004! I was just deleting some previous recipients from 2002 in Mail to clean things up and everything started hanging.

Luckily, I backup my address book automatically to .mac daily (using Backup) and to an external hd whenever I can. There was a successful backup from yesterday and I was able to restore. Boy was my heart pounding! I do everything, including coordinating for several organizations using this program.

The thing that gives me pause though is that I have kind of "different" contents in my Address Book folder:

ABPerson.index (from 2004, modified in 2004)
ABPerson.skIndex (from 2005, modified in 2005)
ABPerson.skIndexInverted (created 12/5/2006, modified 12/5/2006)
AddressBook.data (1.5 MB created 12/6/2006, modified yesterday, 12/7/2006, at 7:33 AM)
AddressBook.data.beforesave (4.3 MB created 6/22/04 modified 5/6/05)
AddressBook.data.beforesave copy.beforesave (520 KB created and modified in 2003)
AddressBook.data.previous (10.1 MB created 12/4/06, modified 12/6/06 3:18 pm)
Images (this is a folder and nothing remarkable in it except a weird file that was created at the exact time that everything hung and disappeared!)

I am really concerned that not only do I not need some of this stuff, but why is "previous" so much bigger than the actual data file? Is my structure corrupt? Is this going to happen again?

I often get the same problem. Today my address book wxent empty again. I noticed the console log is full of the following line :
"Couldn't reopen AddressBook database. Home directory may not be ready or is missing.
Couldn't reopen AddressBook database. Home directory may not be ready or is missing."

My address book was all erased while I was updating my contact card.

Is there anybody ever get all the previous contacts back through the method as above?

HELP!