restoring from Address Book backup

[designmark]

I have an address book (version 1.1) that is backed up on an external hard drive...I would like to gain access or copy the addresses from that address book and add them to my new address book in Panther...how do I do this? I have tried opening the old address book and it won't happen, and, a doucment in the addresses folder of my old user file won't open either...any help would be greatly appreciated...

Thanks,

Mark

[symphonix]

The current version of Address Book will import addresses from an older version (such as 1.1) if it thinks it is being launched for the first time.

If you didn't already have addresses in your new version, I'd advise you to wipe the address book's preference file to make it think it was running for the first time. It would then import the old address book files from {home}/Library/Address Book.

As it is, this is not a good option as this might delete the addresses you've already put into the new address book. So you've got two ways around this.

- Set up a new user account, put the old address book files into the {home}/Library/Address Book folder on that, and then launch address book. It will import the addresses, which you can then save as a VCARD file and then import into your main account. Once all done, you can delete this user account.

- OR, and this might be easier, you can backup all the entries in your new address book as VCARD file, then quit address book, delete the file {home}/Library/Preferences/com.apple.addressbook.plist. Put the old address book file into [home]/Library/Address Book and relaunch address book. It should think its running for the first time and will bring in the files from the old version. You can then re-import the VCARD file of your new address book entries.

Hope this makes sense. My exact wording may not be 100% as I'm going from memory and working on a PC today. :-(