contacts disappeared in Sierra upgrade

I encountered a similar problem. Upgraded from Yosemite to Sierra and my contacts disappeared, but the names of the cards appeared in the sidebar.

I also sync my iphone contacts to icloud and my iphone contacts had no problems. And if I created a new contact on the iphone, the contact appeared OK in the contacts. Ultimately deleting the AddressBook folder (after making a backup), fixed the contacts on the mac.

Spent over two hours trying to repair disappeared contact cards from Contact App. Try lots of advice here, nothing worked.

Your Advice:

By copying the AddressBook folder in Library/App support to desktop and changing the suffix to .abbu it allows it to be imported to Contacts App. Works like a charm.

😎 It may be weird but worked beautifully.

Do not go to Applications

Open Contacts then go into Time Machine

Select date in Time Machine you want...when the data shows in Time Machine view of contacts, select restore.

I just installed the Security Update 2017-005 El Capitan & discovered the same problem this AM. When I went into the CONTACTS a[['s Preferences I had to "enable" the account(s) to populate my contacts which seem's to have worked. However, the "On My MAC" account remains empty...is this the new norm or do I have to otherwise do something to retrieve them...unfortunately I never paid attention to where my contacts actually existed in the past. Are you aware of anything else that may have changed with this "security" update?

Thanks in advance,

billgr0248

THANK YOU for posting this note. I, too, was at the end of my rope, but this is the way to resolve this. I DO make back up copies with Time Machine, but I don't backup to iCloud. NOW, i'm aware that opening the Contacts app and THEN clicking on time machine allows access to previous view of contacts.

You could try doing what my son did. He opened contacts and in the top left hand corner where it says 'all contacts' click and hold and drag onto the desktop and you should see a vcd file appear. Then go into you iCloud account and import the VCF file to that. When you go back to your contacts window you can click on iCloud where it says 'all accounts' and your contacts should all be in there. That is what I have done but I can't progress from there but at least I can see my contacts.

See this link for steps to troubleshoot contacts. Re: High Sierra contacts not working

This is super weird, but if you make a COPY of the folder `~/Library/Application Support/Address Book` to your desktop and then rename the folder `Address Book` to `Address Book.abbu` it magically turns the folder into an Address Book archive file!

Hi, I too have lost all my contacts after upgrading and I have tried iCloud and only a couple are there. I tried restoring from Time Machine but it tells me that the contacts can't be modified and done do it. I tried doing what you said you did but I don't know if I did it correctly. This is what I did. 'I clicked on finder, chose Applications, Clicked on Contacts to open it. Then I clicked on the Time Machine icon in the top bar and chose Enter Time Machine, but it all crashed and cancelled Time Machine and the Contacts window. As other users have said, I too have all the contacts on my phone but it is not an iPhone, just an Android but Google does synchronise the contacts although I can't work out how to send them from my phone to the Mac. Can you or anyone else help please?

Great, that worked for me, too, thanks.

I should note that it is absurdly hard to figure out where the various files referred to in previous posts are hiding. I have no idea why Apple hides the Library folder by default, for example, so that the "Import from archive" guidance provided above is substantially useless.

Hi alex_h1.

Due to a lot of corruptions on my internal drive I had to get my local Apple agents to completely erase it and my OS X 10.8.5 (Mountain Lion) re-installed from scratch.

Although it's all working properly I can't get my Contacts back. The .abbu method won't work because they're just not there. I'd like to use Time Machine but that doesn't work either!

Can you please help me out with this?

Thanks.

I was able to find a .abbu from 11/15/17 and I upgraded to Sierra from to Mountain Lion last night. 1/26/18. My contacts on my phone and the Mountain Lion Contacts have a lot of new contacts since 11/17/18. Can I locate those in Time Machine and import those so Contacts on Sierra are up to date?

Are you trying to import from Snow Leopard Contacts? Did you make a backup of your Snow Leopard files before upgrading to Sierra?

If you can still open the Address Book.app in Snow Leopard, use File > Export > Address Book Archive... to save your data as .abbu file.

This saves your data as .abbu file. You can import this fine into Contact.app in Sierra.

If you cannot open the Address Book.app in Snow Leopard, but you have your Snow Leopard Library files, you can copy over the folder "AddressBook" from the User's Library > Application Support folders that contains the data. Place this on your Desktop. We will discuss how to import into Contacts in Sierra.

Hey Diane... I found a post from another user saying to open the Contacts app on my Sierra HD and then click the Time Machine icon... it automatically opened my missing contacts on the backup drive! I hit the Restore button and wa-la, I have my contacts back. So easy... unfortunate it was so hard to locate a user prescribing this method but all is well that ends well.

This sounds like a permissions error. Check to see if the folder is Read Only. Do a Get Info on the AddressBook folder in your User's Library/Application Support and the AddressBook-v22.abcddb file.

You can click on the Lock and set permissions to Read & Write then under the gear, select "Apply to enclosed items..."

It's possible you need to reset permission for your Home folder. See

Reset permissions

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT203538