[Velauno]

I have and IMAC 20' G5 with 10.4.8

I chose to merge all address book while I had all all 1500 entries highlighted. Why you ask? Because I spaced out and did it while thinking of something else. But enough about me and my screw up.

Address book froze . It completely refuses to open. I have deleted every single address book file (except the addressbook install package) and emptied the trash. I do have a back up of my whole system plus a .mac back up.

I have tried to re-install from the address book package but the instalation fails.

Any ideas

Thanks for your help

Jaime

[FFL]

Try copying the Address Book application from your backup to your Applications folder, restarting, and launching it.

[Velauno]

Thanks FFL

That worked. Now I need to find my addressbook data file in the back up.

THe weird part is that I synced with .mac and I only have 17 contacts when I should have about 1200 and none of the 17 were copied into the address book.

There is addressbook.data 1170k
and addressbook.data.beforesave 2871k
and addressbook.data.previos 2707k

The name of the is addressbook.data right? or all?


thanks again for the help

Jaime

[Velauno]

FFL

Grabbed all the addressbook.data files

restored them all but they landed in some weird place with the little unix exe icon. Found them by mistake because they would not show up in spotlight and dragged them to the proper place ...user/library/application support/addressbook

done deal!

Everything works fine again.


What a lesson! I just got a backup disk and back up software for the first time 2 days ago and now this! I can't believe it took so long to be ready to recover from a disaster and that just now a disaster occurred and I recovered in just a few desperate minutes. Thanks for the help.

Spread the word...do a back up!

Thanks again

Jaime

[turtle]

Pfft....that's not a disaster.

You could have dropped a stapler.

[FFL]

Glad I could help!

For future reference, the folder AddressBook in the Application Support folder of your user Library folder contains all the actual data. All you have to do is drag that folder from the backup and replace the existing one, to restore your data.

restored them all but they landed in some weird place with the little unix exe icon

That makes me suspect that your backup device is in MS-DOS format. You should reformat it as a Mac HFS+ Journaled volume.