Address Book Contacts are Gone

This is a really odd problem that has been going on for sometime now. It first started when I was running Tiger and the problem continues now even with Leopard. The problem is that periodically without warning, all of the contacts in my address book mysteriously disappear - I mean they are gone - deleted. At first, I thought this was an issue with .Mac syncing as I had it set to sync automatically every hour. I have disabled .Mac sync and now only sync manually so I know that it is not an issue with .Mac sync.
Earlier today I checked on my computer and everything was good, all of the contacts were in place. I put in my iPhone and hit sync and left the room. I know for a fact that my iPhone had all my contacts and I know that Address Book had all my contacts. When I came back to the computer a few hours later, Address Book is completely empty - the iPhone has lost all of it's contacts. I logged into .Mac on the internet and all of my contacts are still there. My last sync to .Mac was last night at 7:30. Back when I had .Mac sync set to automatic syncing, it was not uncommon for me to come in and find that all of my contacts would be gone in Address Book and on .Mac as well. I've tried contacting Apple about it and I never received any kind of a response.
Of course I can easily recover everything with my Time Machine backups, but this is perplexing me greatly. How in the heck can this be happening? Is anyone else experiencing anything like this? This is starting to drive me crazy as I cannot figure out how the Address Book is mysteriously losing contacts unless it is happening during the sync process with the iPhone. I would certainly love to hear any suggestions on how to remedy this issue as this is extremely annoying. Thank you.

OK, now I am worried and ticked off! I still dont have my contacts back in place...after spending now over 3 hours with three different apple experts. Where my address book contacts went to no one knows. No "experts" at Apple Care or at the local retail store "Genius Bar" seem to have any answers that are working! Even my .mac backup is not working when I try to "restore" my data from several backup dates before when my contacts vanished suddenly.
I have written several emails today to the .Mac support (Unfortunately only available via e-mail.... I had an apple care rep tell me that .Mac is not really Apple, but an outside firm that runs .Mac).
Here is my last email to .Mac support that I just sent out:
<<Apple and .Mac engineers out there: PLEASE help us. There is a bad bug going around where our contacts are being vaporized and making many of us go crazy. Help us get out of this twilight zone of losing all our contact data!!!!
Read all about it from many upset users at:
<a class="jive-link-external-small" href="http://">http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=6939388#69393 88
Then call me at (my phone number) so I can tell you whats going on with my case and HELP me get my info back! I have sent several other emails to you here today.
Thanks!
Marcel Howard D.>>
I hope this gets us all some help from the Apple Engineers and customer service.
1. What are the common details, including any error messages, related to our problems that we are discussing on this thread?

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My address book contacts are gone

I don't know what happened. One day I was using the contacts and they were all there (about 400 of them). Today I open address book and they are all gone. Only the Apple contact and my contact are there.
Using BACKUP (the one provided by .Mac), I have a pretty recent back up of the entire contents of my computer. And here is my question:
How do I use this back up to reinstall my address book ... and only my address book.
Is there a certain file that I can take from the back up that will do this?
Any help is appreciated.

That is odd, is all the rest of your account information correct? If so, then the Address Book database probably got bumped someplace that it doesn't understand.
The Address Book database should be here:
Home/Library/Application Support/AddressBook
Make sure it is there and correctly named.
If you have to, restoring from Backup is easy, launch it, click restore and you will see the choices: among them will be Address Book. Click it and off you go!

My Address Book Contacts Are Gone After Updating to SL 10.6 - Help!

I updated from Leopard to Snow Leopard and all my contacts in my address book are gone. How do I get them back? All my email is there, but it seems to have wiped out programs too.

Hi JCH4CHG;
Restore from the backup you took prior to the upgrade.
Allan

POP3 Mail & Address Book contacts have gone!

I recently did some housekeeping on my Mum's iBook G4 (OSX 10.4.10), part of which was purchasing and installing SpamSieve into Mail. This all went fine. Today she said all the mail in her POP3 inbox had gone, she couldn't send/receive and all her address book contacts had gone (Except hers and Apples).
I've got the iBook now and have noticed that her account type in Mail has somehow changed to a .Mac account (did I somehow do this, or did she???). This is obviously the root of the problem as the
email address now has '@mac.com' appended to the end and the incoming mail server is now 'mail.mac.com' and the outgoing is 'smtp.mac.com:heremailaddress' which is all wrong. I'm unable to change the account type back to POP or the incoming mail server from 'mail.mac.com' (it's greyed out) back to what it was.
I have now created a second account with the correct POP settings and have received in all unread email, but the read email messages have gone. I am unable to send as the new correct pop account is only offered the incorrect outgoing server ('smtp.mac.com:heremailaddress').
Having read several post on this forum, I feel the Mail/Address Book issues are connected and that maybe the application(s) database(s) have been corrupted. I've tried the Address Book remedy at http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=5248351&#5248351 but this does nothing. The 'user'>Library>Mail folder shows the two accounts as two separate folders. The recently recreated account folder has the new unread messages in the 'INBOX.mbox folder, but the older account folder (which now has 'MAC-' added to the front of its name) only has 'info.plist' in a 'INBOX.imapmbox' folder!
I don't believe any back-ups are available. Can anyone help me restore her old unread mail, and possibly her address book contacts?
I've also just noticed that SpamSieve does not launch as it should when I launch Mail, even though It was purchased and the scripts installed correctly.

Didn’t you make a backup prior to the housekeeping?
I don’t know why would Spotlight find contacts that are gone from Address Book (if that’s what you mean), but as far as Mail goes, under some circumstances (e.g. lack of available disk space, filesystem corruption, repeated crashes), Mail may discard the current ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.mail.plist preferences file and create a new one. This file is where all the account settings are stored. As a result, all the non-.Mac account settings (but not the messages themselves) are lost. If you had a .Mac account, its settings would appear to have been preserved because Mail would set up that account automatically using the System Preferences > .Mac settings.
What’s the capacity and space available on the startup disk? Take a look at the comments about disk space in the following article, in case they apply to you:
Problems from insufficient RAM and free hard disk space
Verify/repair the startup disk (not just permissions), as described here:
The Repair functions of Disk Utility: what’s it all about?
After having fixed all the filesystem issues, if any, and ensuring that there’s enough space available on the startup disk (a few GB, plus the space needed to make a backup copy of the Mail folder), quit Mail if it’s running, and make a backup copy of the ~/Library/Mail folder, e.g. by dragging it to the Desktop while holding the Option (Alt) key down, just in case something else goes wrong while trying to solve the problem. This is where all your mail is stored.
You have three options now:
(1) Restore ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.mail.plist from a backup if you have one. Mail shouldn’t be running while you do this.
(2) Set up your mail accounts again (you may want to quit Mail and trash the new com.apple.mail.plist first to start over). If given the option to import existing mailboxes or something like that, don’t. Just enter the account information and Mail will automagically rediscover the data in ~/Library/Mail/ when done. You’ll also have to re-configure most of your settings in Mail > Preferences. For spam-related security reasons, the first thing you should do is go to Preferences > Viewing and disable Display remote images in HTML messages if it’s enabled.
(3) Mail may have renamed the old preferences file to com.apple.mail.plist.saved. If that’s the case, you may try trashing the new com.apple.mail.plist and renaming the old com.apple.mail.plist.saved back to com.apple.mail.plist. Again, be sure Mail isn’t running while doing this. Given the circumstances, there exists the possibility that com.apple.mail.plist.saved became corrupt, but that often is not the case and the settings can usually be restored by just renaming the file back to com.apple.mail.plist.
As a side effect of re-creating com.apple.mail.plist, Mail might rename Outbox (which is where messages waiting to be sent are stored) to Delivered. The name of that mailbox is actually a misnomer, as it would contain messages (if any) that couldn’t be delivered for some reason. You can delete that mailbox if you wish.
Note: For those not familiarized with the ~/ notation, it refers to the user’s home folder. That is, ~/Library is the Library folder within the user’s home folder, i.e. /Users/username/Library.

Address Book: contact pictures gone

I have a couple of hundred contact pictures in my Address Book. After I did a lot of syncing back and forth recently between 2 Macs and an iPhone, I notice that a lot of them don't show any more. From inspecting the Images folder in my Library, I think that they are still there. I also notice that the pics have very different file formats: Some are listed as TIFF or jpg files, some as "pure text" and some as "executable Unix" files. Could that be the reason I can't see them? Since they don't have suffixes - how could I change the file type? And would they still be assigned to their contacts? (I don't want to re-assign 800+ pics to their contacts, and frankly with some pictures I don't even know who they are! )

Apple doesn’t routinely monitor the discussions. These are mostly user to user discussions.
Send Apple feedback. They won't answer, but at least will know there is a problem. If enough people send feedback, it may get the problem solved sooner.
Feedback

HT204053 Using I cloud my address book/ contacts are different. When I try to send mail typing in a name does not recognize it

iCloud help, my contacts- address book are different &when I try to send mail by typing in a name it is not recognized

Make sure your default contacts account is set to iCloud. To change this go to settings > mail, calendars, contacts > default account and choose iCloud.

Birthdays added to Address Book contacts are not showing in ical

I have added my contacts birthdays in Address Book but it hasnt populated over to iCal

It is a good idea to include the machine type and OS version in your problem posts.
Have you selected "Show birthday calendars" in iCal's Preferences/General?

Why have my Address Book contacts disappeared after uploading to iCloud?

I am using my MacBook Pro w/OSX Lion.
After having many, many problems with contacts, calendars and bookmarks in MobileMe, migrating to iCloud, encountering a huge mess of duplicates and even completely missing contacts I decided to start over. So I disabled the iCloud account on all Macs and IOS devices. I then ensured all contacts, calendars and bookmarks were deleted from the MacBook Pro. I then used the Address Book export I'd made just prior to the migration from Mobile Me to iCloud and imported this onto my MacBook Pro. I've completely gone though the Address Book and removed or merged duplicates and cleaned up all contacts with detail. I backed up my Address Book again at this point. I then logged into iCloud.com using my original Apple User ID (NOT the MobileMe/me.com account which I'm going to vacate) and ensured that there were no contacts in the cloud and I deselected the default calendars here as well. My intention was/is to begin by starting small and deal only with the MacBook Pro Address Book and iCloud Contacts. So after I confirmed there is no data in the cloud I go into the MacBook Pro System Preferences > iCloud > Account Details ensuring I was signed out of the me.com user and entered my original Apple ID I've had since I started using iTunes many years back. I quit the browser and the Address Book and verified the non me.com user was saved under the System Preferences. I then selected Contacts under these iCloud System Preferences and I was asked If I wanted to merge my contacts with those in the cloud. Because there were no contacts in the cloud I selected yes. The spinning indicator indicated that the upload was occurring. Now, there are no contacts in the cloud and the Address Book contacts are missing. Thinking that my doing the Address Book backup may have removed all the data from the Address Book, I deselected Contacts in the iCloud System Preferences, reimported the backup into Address Book that I'd just done, confirmed the contacts I just imported appear in Address Book and I reselect Contacts in the iCloud System Preferences and again I get the spinning indicator. Again, there are no Contacts in the cloud and the contacts are missing from Address Book.
What the heck am I doing wrong? I've simplified my original attempt with iCloud by concentrating my efforts to just contacts AND I'm only using the MacBook and the iCloud cloud and I've still got problems. I thought this approach would narrow down where the issue lies and allow me to monitor the process more easily but I seem to be worse off than before I'd tried to resolve the initial migration problems because now I have no contacts.
I'm new to Macs so if you have a solution, please help and please give specifics because I'm still learning the structure and don't understand a lot of the acronyms and jargon.
Thanx

If you have a back up file, I'd try turning off iCloud contact syncing on all macs from system preferences > iCloud –
DONE
as well as any secondary accounts from system preferences > mail, contacts and calendars –
DONE (this was confusing but I figured out that you meant System Preferences > Mail, Contacts & Calendars which is what you said in lowercase. For some reason without the capital letters I didn't clue in that Mail, Contacts and Calendars was an icon option under the System preferences and so I overlooked it multiple times. I see your use of "secondary account" which I note used also as a term in the User Tip link you referred me to view. Although, I still don't understand what this 'secondary' account is, I'm not interested in any secondary accounts because I've got my hands full with just iCloud for now. I did delete all accounts under the Mail, Contacts & Calendars).
If you have any iOS devices I'd do the same on those as well. –
DONE (not even introducing other Macs or IOS devices to the equation until I get the iCloud and MacBook syncing contacts correctly)
I'd log into iCloud.com and check my Address Book was empty and empty it if necessary –
DONE (it was empty already)
and then delete all contacts from every Address Book on every device
         DONE
Then I'd turn Address Book syncing back on –
DONE (This assuming that by ‘turn back on’ you mean System Preferences > iCloud and check marking the box next to Contacts)
and import my contacts from the backup file –
DONE (This assuming that by ‘import my contacts’ you mean importing the previously exported Address Book back up file back into the Address Book. I see contacts listed in the Address Book when I did this.)
No syncing seems to happen at this point?
you might also take a look at this User Tip, to ensure you understand the differences between the different accounts in Address Book before adding the contacts back.
         I did read this but understand is probably not an accurate term for my interpretation of what I read. I get that On My Mac will not sync with what is in the cloud and iCloud will sync with the cloud. In Address Book under the single head red ribbon I see neither account heading that is mentioned. I also was not asked at the time of import to select which ‘account’ I’d like the contacts setup under.
A) If there is no indication as to what Address Book account the contacts fall under, how does on find this out?
User Tips states
Your Address Book when synced with iCloud will have more than one account.
     My assumption is that I'm not synced with iCloud if I don't see either account option listed. I also would think that if I'm not synced and thus don't have more than one account then perhaps the All Contacts default to an On My Mac account but don't reflect an account heading of 'On My Mac’ as seen on the screen shot of the User Tips example.
Furthermore, User Tips also states
Default Account
Your 'default'account is set in address book preferences > general (the option is only displayed if you have more than one account).
         It would seem relevant to list which account your defaulted to even if you do not have more than one account because elsewise how are you supposed to know which account it is setup under?
B) How do you change which ‘account’ your contacts are setup under if they are under the wrong account?
         Assuming again that my contacts are ‘On My Mac’, then how do I move them to the ‘iCloud’ account of which is not listed?
C) Will any of this be affected by groups?
The five listings under All Contacts are groups that I set up as a sort of invitation list (so Christmas cards is one I’d probably setup this time of year). Although this question is secondary I would like to confirm that my interpretation of groups is accurate. I understand groups to be a sort of tagging of selected contacts from All Contacts but that the contacts in these groups are not duplicates to those in All Contacts. Is this correct? I ask because the User Tips states
To quickly duplicate a contact, drag it to your desktop, navigate to 'Groups', select the account you wish to duplicate to, double click the contact on your desktop.
            When reading this tip, I interpret that dragging and dropping contacts from All Contacts into a group would be similar to what is suggested in this tip which would indeed ‘duplicate’ the contact. I did drag and drop when I setup my groups so I’m concerned I duplicated the contacts in Address Book. I do not see two copies of the same contact under All Contacts though.
By the way, don't take it personally –
I don't, I have reading difficulties galore and am happy to accommodate if I can. I hope this is better. Helping you helps me if you're not struggling to read when thinking about the solution.
Thanx

All my contacts are gone from my iphone and my address book!!

All of a sudden, I synced my iphone with my imac as usual and all my contacts are gone out of the phone and the address book onmy computer. Help! Thanks

Do you not maintain a backup of your important data saved to an external hard drive used for backup purposes only or to CD media?
The Address Book application includes a simple backup database option as does iCal which is simple to restore the entire database from in the event something like this occurs.
Do you have a .Mac account? If so, you can recover all contacts from your .Mac online address book. If not and you don't have a backup of this data available in some fashion, you are in trouble.

Hello can someone help me I have an iphone 4 and my daughter has an ipod touch we are on the same email address but somehow with in the last 25hrs all of my contacts are gone and only hers on on my phone is there a way for me to get all my contacts back?

Hello can someone help me I have an iphone 4 and my daughter has an ipod touch we are on the same email address but somehow with in the last 25hrs all of my contacts are gone and only hers on on my phone is there a way for me to get all my contacts back?

If you need assistance with finding any of your restores or attempting to restore from any that happened prior to his incident follow this article
http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1766
IF you do find a backup that has your contacts; I'd /highly/ recommand turning off your wifi network after the restore is finished because if the issue is with your iCloud your contacts may merge back with her's.
With iCloud you DO NOT want to share the account; bad things happen Evil evil thigns...
But in all seriousness; if two devices have the same iCloud; iCloud is told to merge and sync infomation between hte two and can't tell that it doesn't belong to the same person

Where are Address Book contacts stored in Mac Os X 7 Lion

Where are Address Book contacts stored in Mac Os X 7 Lion

Click the desktop to activate Finder.
Hold the option key down and click the "Go" menu in the menu bar and then select "Library" from the dropdown.
Library > Application Support > AddressBook

Are my Address Book contacts in iCloud or On My Mac?

Is there some reason why, since iCloud, we have to have duplicates of every Contact in our Address Book?
Additionally, when I'm cleaning up my Address Book on my MacBook Pro (10.7.3) there's no way to tell if a contact is in "On My Mac" or "iCloud".
I have seen no clear discussion of this. If I change an entry for "John Q Smith" in my Address Book, why doesn't it "Unify" as they do on my iPhone? I end up with two different Address Book entries, one in either iCloud or "On My Mac" with the changes and another without the changes.
There is no field on an "Address Book" contact indicating its source ["On My Mac", or "iCloud"].
Why do I need two entries for every entry in my Address Book? This issue has been correctly identified and treated on the iPhone — I get a "Unified" classification and a change to the Contact happens synchronously.

I am already configured for, and using iCloud as my default account.
If I select "All Contacts", I have duplicates of every entry in my Address Book.
When I select the corresponding option on my iPhone, I get "Unified Contacts" — this is GOOD and SMART — when I change a 'Unified' contact on my iPhone, all the entries are synchronously changed. This is how Mac OS X 10.7.3's Address Book should be treating these entries. Is there not an option somewhere to activiate this same feature?
IF I REMOVE "ON MY MAC" FROM MY ADDRESS BOOK ACCOUNTS, I WILL BE UNABLE TO SYNCHORONISE MY ADDRESS BOOK WITH ANY OTHER SERVICE SUCH AS GOOGLE OR YAHOO. This is highly undesireable. As lovely and singular as is Apple and it's products, there are other services in the world with which I must coordinate and this is beyond my control.
It looks like, from the responses above, that I will be editing every duplicate Address Book contact for the foreseeable future if I want to have non-Apple sync-able contact database as well as be on iCloud, which I do love.

On iCloud we are currently getting frequent "Contacts has stopped responding" error message. We are a small company that accesses our address book contacts off-site.

On iCloud we are currently getting frequent "Contacts has stopped responding" error message. We are a small company that accesses our address book contacts off-site. Any solutions?

I've deleted all future appointments from the Hotmail calendar.
I've left the iPad overnight "thinking" about removing Calendar from iCloud and gave up this morning.
My son has school information on the iPad.
Please help???
Regards,
Anthony

Disappearing Address Book Contacts

This is a duplicate or my response to another similar problem, but I think this problem should have it's own topic.
My Address book contacts have been occasionaly disappearing, I would open Address book and all my contacts would be gone except for the "Apple" and "Me". And I would end up restoring from a backup, which I been doing fequently when this problem first started.
Recently I discovered what the problem is. I have an external drive connected and somehow my Address book contacts have defaulted to being stored on the external drive in a folder I had created for some temporary work some time ago. When I noticed it was still there (some time later) I trashed it.
It took a while for me to make the connection that when I deleted the folder, the address contacts would be gone. Because I wouldn't use my Address Book for days or maybe weeks afterwards
I finally realized that this "temporary" folder kept mysteriously reappearing, so when I checked, it contained the same folder structure as the <user>/library/application support/Address Book/ and sure enough that is where my address book is storing my contacts.
This has me baffled, there are no preference settings to even change the default storage location (or I couldn't find them) Looking at com.apple.addressbook.plist has no storage folder either.
Any ideas on how this can be corrected? Or even how it happened?
Little more information. This is my primary user account which has FileVault turned on and also syncs with dotmac to my MacBook. The sync works fine by the way, but those contacts should be within the secure volume.
My only thought for a fix would be to back up my user folder (data only, no settings). Delete the account. And then recreate the account and restore my data, but I'd rather not do that if I don't have to, I'm hoping for the quick and simple fix.
What do yo think?

Replying to my own post.
I think I've fixed my problem by simply disconnecting the external drive. With the drive disconnected, Address Book came up empty again. So I restored from my backup and checked that the files updated in the correct (home) folder.
<user>/Library/Application Support/Address Book/
Still haven't any clue as to how my contacts suddenly started saving themselves on my external drive to begin with.

HT1386 lost my address book contacts when updating my iphone 3s

did a recent update through itunes and lost my address book contacts on my iphone

Aren't you using your phone as recommended and synching your contacts with your computer (Address Book, Outlook) or a cloud service? Just synch them back.
If you're not using your phone as recommended then your contacts are likely gone. Lesson learned.

Address Book Contacts are Gone

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