i lost all my contacts because of isync

The easy way to get back your contacts is to use Address Book's "Revert to Address Book Backup..." command on the "File" menu.

You do make regular backups of your important Contact data don't you?

julian,
i'm in the same boat. iSync worked fine on my treo700p. when I got a replacement phone (the same) and synced, everything worked but the contacts. I use Backup to backup all my stuff, but it backs up daily, and I didn't catch it in the first day. Now what?
for some reason, an old version of my contacts is intact in the palm desktop (perhaps dating to when I first started using isync.) This is not ideal, but if I could get those 900 contacts back on my phone and laptop, it would be an excellent start.
PS i also backup onto an external harddrive. how might I access that without having it sync the wrong way?
thanks!
Joel

is there a complicated way? My backup is a bit out of date (i know...) Address book randomly deleted my entire list of contacts a few days ago. I synced with my phone and poof, synced the wrong way and deleted everything from my phone too. Is there any way, complicated as you like, of getting an undo? The files must be somewhere! Please help.
Many thanks
FuzzyJez

You did not synchronize the wrong way. There is no right or wrong way to do so, except if—when offered the choice of merging or replacing data during a first-time synchronization event—you make an inappropriate choice. What occurred is the normal, predictable outcome when you remove data from an application, device or server—or, it is effectively removed by some action other than one you took—and you subsequently synchronize. iSync, and other components of the Sync Services framework, are designed to equate records sets everywhere following a synchronization event.

Read this document to gain a reasonable understanding of how this technology works:

http://developer.apple.com/macosx/syncservices.html

And, periodically back up your contact, calendaring and task or to do records with, at a minimum, the facility to do so built into both the Address Book and iCal.

If such an event occurs in the future, turn off any automatic synchronization and avoid triggering any manual synchronization events until you have resolved the issue, to avoid propagating the unwanted changes across you entire synchronized device pool.

Right or wrong, there still isn't an answer - how can one restore the data if the sync didn't work out as the user expected? Sometimes you just don't know you forgot to check something until its too late.

As for backing up data beforehand, the reason I do a sync is to back up my phone. If isync stomps on that data, there isn't a backup to be had. Isn't there a restorable backup done by isync before it does it's job? That existed in isync 1.5, i think. It's odd to remove functionality, especially for something as important as assuring safe data transferring.

17" G4 powerbook Mac OS X (10.4.9) 1 gig ram