Today, cold fire flashed through me as I saw that after using iSync to synchronize my Motorola SLVR L7 contacts with my Macbook’s AddressBook, all the data in my AddressBook disappeared.
That was more than two years’ worth of contacts that I thought went down the drain.
And so, what I did was that I looked throughout the files in my hard drive, because I knew that Mac apps tend to create backups even without the user specifying it. True enough, I saw a curious little file named AddressBook.data.previous.
I opened it using TextEdit, and I saw that it contained the numbers of my contacts, as they were before the sync. What I did next was what I usually do when I mess up my Ubuntu desktop: I typed AddressBook.data.previous on Yahoo. (Google is down on my isp 🙁 ) There I found articles on what to do with it to restore the data on my AddressBook.
What you do is, go to UserAccount>Library>Application Support>AddressBook. There you will find AddressBook.data.previous. Simply rename that into AddressBook.data (just remove .previous), toss the other AddressBook.data to the trash, and voila, you have your contacts back in place.
Kudos to this post on macuser, I’ve been saved of a huge amount of tooth-gnashing and weeping.
So kiddos, remember to backup, backup, backup. I backed up my AddressBook as soon as I got it up and running again. Make several copies, so you won’t have a “cold fire” moment like I did.
Thank God Macs were built to backup. :p