How to completely clear Apple Address Book in preparation for recovery?

September 25, 2009 8:22 AM

Recovering Address Book data. Apple Address Book phantom entries keep returning, even after deleting the data files and prefs lists. Where are they coming from? How can I get the original data back?

I'm trying to help someone recover their address book data after they upgraded from Tiger to Snow Leopard.

They started with around 200 address cards. After the Snow Leopard upgrade they have 20. These 20 don't seem to have anything in common with eachother.

Several online resources indicate that I could use the file:

~\Library\Application Support\Address Book\AddressBook.data.previous

...by deleting the AddressBook.data file, and renaming the above to sit in its place. I've sifted through the AddressBook.data.previous file with an editor. It's 1.9 MB, and appears to contain all of her 200 cards.

I haven't been able to get the replacement working, though, because of this oddity:

1. Close Mail, Address Book, iCal.
2. Delete the entire ~\Library\Application Support\Address Book folder, and delete all of the ~\Library\Preferences\com.apple.addressbook* files.
3. Re-open Address Book.

Result: Those 20 cards are back. The Address Book comes up empty first, then these cards magically appear. The Application Support\Address Book folder now contains data related to these cards, where before it didn't even exist.

MobileMe sync is disabled. There is no other Sync option in the Address Book preferences Accounts area. Where are these cards coming from?

I have a feeling that if I solve this part, I could probably get the recovery working, but I'm stumped.

posted by odinsdream to computers & internet (6 comments total)

A sharpening tip, not a solution: when the 20 contacts return, do they have icons/photos, or are they all generic, with only text info?

If they have icons/photos, they're being replaced/restored by an Apple product, whether on the local Mac or .Mac or somesuch. If they're stripped to text-only, they're being resynched from Google or a workalike.

For new versions as significant as a 10.x, I'm a huge fan of reinstalling from scratch, because even if the "upgrade" works perfectly it leaves a lot of 10.x-1 cruft around that you don't need. Apple's every year or two new version is a good coincidental milestone for a complete backup and reformat anyway. Healthy.

Plus at the end of it, you have a fresh backup! :)
posted by rokusan at 12:29 PM on September 25

rokusan: Unfortunately wipe-and-install isn't going to fly with this particular person. In any case, it's just address book so far that's causing trouble.

The cards are actual people from her previous list. They have no photos. She had Google Sync enabled for awhile, but that's turned off now and has been through several reboots so far.
posted by odinsdream at 12:32 PM on September 25

You don't have to do a wipe and install. You can do an archive and install. All the user data is preserved. Aye there's the rub...If the problem is with the user's account.
posted by Gungho at 1:09 PM on September 25

If she was running google sync, maybe there are google preference files that need to be deleted or the google app is running in the background. I don't know what other apps stuff things in the address book but I wouldn't be surprised if some Microsoft products did.

Have you searched in spotlight for the names of the people in the address book? That might help you figure out where they are hiding. If you are a sophisticated unix hacker and one of the rogue addresses has a nice unique name, you could grep the whole filesystem. It's got to be there somewhere.
posted by chairface at 1:27 PM on September 25

Well, on the point of re-installing, I'm not sure how that will fix the issue. It might have prevented it in the first place, but now that the addresses are gone, I'm not sure what that would solve.

Good thought on the filesystem grep. I'll see if I can get the system long enough to try it. I'm going to start up an old Tiger system I have here and see if I can get the address book data loaded into that copy, then exported.

Mostly I'm going crazy by these few cards spontaneously showing back up after deleting all the address book files. I feel like that's preventing me from opening up her .previous file on the machine.
posted by odinsdream at 6:32 PM on September 25

Resolution:

Killing the SyncServer process, then going to iSync and resetting all sync preferences fixed the issue of contacts re-appearing.

I recovered her contacts by taking her Address Book data file to an old 10.4 Tiger box that I had at home. That version of Address Book worked just fine when I renamed AddressBook.data.previous to AddressBook.data.

I was then able to export the contacts to a file (had to do vcards, the native export didn't work) and re-import them into her 10.6 Snow Leopard Address Book.
posted by odinsdream at 11:26 AM on October 1