The post said i'd downloaded and was running 10.8.5, the mavericks information is from before this machine crashed and i parked it last fall. I'll update that information and stick to the os numbering system as the variety of animal and park names becomes a jumble in my mind.
Here's the story of this machine. I ran a titanium G4 for 10 years, finally had to replace the hard drive and a friend suggested i upgrade to a newer machine and pass the titanium down to the granddaughter in high school. So i did, her friend managed to tear the screen off of it, but plugged into a separate screen it still runs.
The machine i upgraded to ran for quite a few years when the video card went wonky. Online investigation showed that the video card was soldered in a great many places to the mother board, and macbook pro's being known to get warm, the solder failed. This was apparently a common issue with this model. OK, expensive to fix and doomed by design to this failure and another down the road should i fix it. So thinking this was a one off engineering design failure, and having the brand loyalty to mac that i feel for toyota, i bought this one, last year.
I downloaded the free yosemite upgrade, didn't like it much, but oh well. Not long after, maybe 6 months into it's life, it died. Being very frustrated, i parked it for another 6 months to use a dreaded windows 7 machine given by a sympathetic, windows using friend. So i recently decided to give it another chance. Command r allowed to check the hard drive which was fine. So using the access command r gave me i tried reloading from my snow leopard cd. This obviously didn't work as the disk belonged to the machine before this one. I'm old and forgetful, sorry. Tried by the same process to reload from online and it tried to reload yosemite. This ended with the triangle containing an exclamation point that said it wasn't happening. So command r, erase the disk, command r again, and eureka, it gives me a version of 10.8.5 that's new and improved and very different from how i remember it.
Well it obviously won't take a restore using time machine from my seagate backup disc as the os has changed. But being somewhat resourceful, though technically far from proficient, being over 60 years old, i did gather from the back up disk some data, such as bookmarks, calendar data, addresses, mail, etc. The bookmarks were salvaged as was the calendar information, but i don't know where to look on the backup to find anything applying to mail.
But the contacts application is just plain broken. I have an address book plug-ins folder in the system library and as well a .abbu file. But beyond trying to reload anything, it lacks an ability to accept more than one group, and if you type in contact information manually, close the program and reopen it, everything you put in it was gone. As a possible fix, i ran the combo update and as shown above, that didn't take.
Software update says i should upgrade to yosemite, didn't like it before, but thought maybe it's been improved, hopefully better than this version of mountain lion (10.8.5). In doing so, i managed to download perhaps 90% of yosemite when it paused itself. Now every effort to resume results in error 1004. I've been trying to resume periodically for the last 18 hours without luck. Sorry for writing a book, but trying to correct my misinforming about versions, etc.
