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

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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?

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!

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.

ALL my contacts are gone after IOS5 update. WHY?

I can't find my contacts anywhere, after updating to IOS5. There are not even in my address book on my mac. I backed up my ipod regularly, and did on last backup right before i updated to IOS5. They are all gone, i don't understand why. Does anyone here have ANY ideas? (i really, REALLY don't want to type in all my contacts, i probably could not even remember them all). please help, thanks.

I tries that and they didn't come back? : ( ANy other ideas? -thanks!

All contacts and calendar details are gone after updating it to iOS 7.0.6

My contacts and important particulars in my calendar are all gone. Instead my contacts has been replace with unknown contacts which I find it strange. I've done twice restore backup from previous back up session and is still a no go. Does anyone know how to fix it?

Im not sure if it actually affects the software updating even if i click dont trust this computer and it wasn't even syncing in it.
I restore my phone and did a restore back up twice my contacts are missing. Even i key in manually minutes later my contacts sort of self deletes itself.

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

All My Contacts have gone after updating iphone4 to ios5

So i decided to move with the times and finally update my iphone as some apps would no longer work without updating to ios5.
Everything is in my phone apps, music, calenders, notes emails but the contacts have all gone. I have tried to restore my iphone through itunes but this hasnt worked i only had one restore option available which was a sync that was completed after my contacts were gone from the update.
I now realise how stupid this was to never have uploaded my contacts to so sort of app but to be honest i never gave it a second thought. Is there anywhere i can get my contacts from or are ther lost forever????
please have some magic fix for me
Pete

I've lost mine, too. However, I've found that they're all there if I go in via the phone. The contacts app just shows "no contacts". When searching from other apps (such as Reminders), it doesn't find anything, but spotlight finds them.

Address book contacts in red - latest update v31

i downloaded the latest update v31.
Now my contacts in address book are in red and are not are automatically found as typing their name.
Had this problem in a Beta version and un-installed this, and then re-installed an older version.
The problem was corrected and now its back with this version too.
Any clues/tips.
thanks

For me with v31, the names/email addresses appear in red and it auto-completes them - because they are in my address book.
If I open the message in the Sent folder, they're black now with the gold star.

Camera profiles are gone after update of Camera Raw

Hi,
After an, automatic, update to camera raw 7.3 in Photoshop Elements 11 all Camera Profiles are gone. All that is left is "Matrix". Can someone please help me?
I use Elements 11, windows Vista on a 64-bit machine, my camera is a Nikon D7000.
Thanks!

Do you have Photoshop CS6 installed on same machine?
You can install the DNG converter from:
http://www.adobe.com/support/downloads/detail.jsp?ftpID=5519
This will restore all camera profiles on your machine

Address Book contact info changes after sending an email to contact

So this issue has plagued me for some time and I have finally just been annoyed enough by it to ask.
I have a contact for my mom which used to be her first name and last name which I later changed to just "Mom" in the first name box after getting an iPhone. At the same time I started syncing with MobileMe and have been having this problem for about 2 years.
Every time I send her an email it changes her name from just Mom to Mom and then adds her last name back into the last name field.
Has anyone else experienced this and figured out a fix?

It's very simple why this happens: you're using Address Book incorrectly by not using somebody's first and last name. Mail and Address Book communicate, so every time you send an email to someone, whatever their name is setup as in their email account is what gets overwritten into Address Book when you don't have the same thing.

All old e-mails are gone after update

After updating my Gen. 1 iPhone to 2.0 today, I noticed that all the e-mail messages that were on the phone were gone. Inbox, Sent, all of them. Is anybody else experiencing this? I haven't yet tried sending an e-mail to see if my phone is having the same sending issues many of you seem to be having....

I contacted Apple Support to ask for a solution. During a couple of days I received several phone calls asking for info of my different devices and configurations. They didn't have an explanation for my problem and only can recover e-mails for one week ago and. They decide to report to engineering to see what happened and recover the rest.
Meanwhile, after 3 days, my Mail program start to download ALL my mail again. 5000 unreaded e-mails in my inbox. The same way they disappeared they returned. No explanation, no moves, no clicks, nothing. IPhone and iPad sync perfectly.
Two days after that (weekend) Apple Support has called me again (this morning). And that's the strangest part, they have bad news for me because they (nor support neither engineers) cannot recover my lost e-mails!!! Then, I've told them my e-mail has returned and they didn't know it. My problem was solved but Apple Support didn't have a clue why or when.
Happy end but my confidence in iCloud Service has decreased a lot. I've been using my mac.com adress for more than 10 years (most of them paying around 100$) and I didn't expect that kind of surprises and unknwoledge from Apple.

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?

Files are gone after updating Mac Air to OS X 10.8.5

I have update my Mac Air to OS X 10.8.5. Now all my files and pictures are gone, my iPhoto are empty! What can i do???

Restore the missing files from your Time Machine backup.

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

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