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TICKET ARCHIVE -> Restoring lost contact in Address Book

catalist - Jun 11, 2008 - 8:58 am

In my address book, I keep a lot of account information. And I use it a lot.

One important contact had a lot of data that will be hard to replace. But, the good news is that I back up the address book regularly and the last back up is only five days old.

Here is the problem, I was working on entering more data on that important contact, and Address Book evoked the spinning beach ball and froze. After 30 minutes of beach balling, I force quit the application only to learn that that the entire record for that important contact was lost.

If I import from an archive, the only option is to over write the entire address book and I would loose another 10 or so entries I have made in the mean time.

So, the question is, how does one either 'merge' a backup without 'purging', or how does one extract just one contact from the archive.

I tried just tried opening the archive in BBEdit and it would take days to find what I am looking for. I recently purchased .mac, but have not set up address book synchronization yet.

Any thoughts on how to get just that one address retrieved?

I am running OSX 10.5.3 on an iMac G5

earthsaver - Jun 12, 2008 - 11:11 pm

If you'd been using Time Machine, you could retrieve the single lost contact in an instant. In your case, I suggest creating a new user, putting the backup file in the /Users/Shared, and restoring it while logged into that user. Then, drag the card out of Address Book to create a vCard file in the Shared folder.

Return to your regular user and open the vCard; Address Book should ask about merging with the existing contact. Alternatively, if you renamed the contact before dragging out the vCard, then Address Book would simply import it as a new contact and you could merge data manually.

- Ben