NO CONTACTS BACKUP FOR MAC USERS

Skype's Help pages breezily state that no backup is ever needed. Cuz Skype server cloud bla bla. You see.
Oh. There IS a backup procedure described, for Windows only. After the declaration that backing up is for sissies (Windows users? Sorry for the dig...), the Help article does then say clearly that NO such procedure is available for Mac.
We have been through a terrible experience in which my wife's Skype account was suspended -- for reasons never clear to us. The verification failed repeatedly; long chat sessions and multiple re-tries later somebody apparently realized this all was to no purpose and provided a path to reactivate her account.
BUT.
The loss, had that not been possible, was of her contact list. I am worried about the same in my case, because not only are some numbers uniquely stored there, but a whole world of personal habit takes me back to look at Skype to retrieve many numbers. And then, usually, to use Skype to call them. Skype should be ashamed for not providing for the very real eventuality of the loss of a contact list. Safely archiving them on its servers does the user no good when Skype also makes access to that person's account impossible.
So this is a call to Skype to get on the ball. Not much more to be said. This forum and third party internet discussion areas are bursting with sad and -- dare one say it -- very angry (with justification) tales of woe. We add ours, here, implicitly.
In an email reply to the Skype person who did at last provide the means to re-access the account, we added our thought that the disconnects and wasted time were, if nothing else, a perfect advertisement for Skype's competitors, especially for KEKO (keko.com) which provides similar services at similar prices, and adds functionality such as making a simple local call and having that be processed via KEKO to connect with an international number anywhere in the world.
I hope that by including the direct reference to another VoIP provider, one which offers superior service, may goad Skype into action. If Skype will fix the contacts backup issue I will remove what I have written about another provider; and continue to use Skype as a principal channel. 
That is, until Skype also fixes the horrible and wasteful, and -- for us -- ineffective (until someone apparently stepped in personally to set the account straight -- but who knows -- perhaps we were just lucky and that may as well not have happened, either?) manner it has to re-verify accounts. That has to see a revamp, too.
My wife and I have manually created an archive of our contact lists. Just everyone will be able to profit from our magical method, here it is: we made screen shots on the Mac of every 'page' of the contact list; that is, scroll down, hit Ctl + Shft + 3, hit fn + down arrow, and repeat until all 'pages' of contacts have been saved as screen shots.
Then, open in Preview, select all, and Print, exporting as a pdf; which can just be saved and/or printed for a hard copy archive.
As an embellishment, having Photoshop, we also opened the files in a batch in Adobe Camera Raw, where it is possible to batch process to enhance clarity on-screen, and to crop the screen shots en masse so that in the pdf the hard-copy printout can be made on fewer pages.
It's a KLUGE. 
So is SKYPE, folks. 
Good day. 

Unfortunately, this solution doesn't work on a Mac. I haven't been able to find a solution that does, so I'm putting one together. At a minimum, if you're familiar with grep (or have Text Wrangler, which allows grep-style replace and search), here's how you can convert your .pbb file to a text file that can be imported by Address Book:
Unfortunately, I've had to mess with this extensively to avoid the forum's formatting. Hopefully it works OK.
delete header ('CELLPBKb100' in my case)
\[\^a-z\^A-Z\^0-9\] -> null
(\[a-z\])(\[A-Z\]) -> \1 \2
(\[a-zA-Z\])(\[0-9\]) -> \1\t\2
(\[0-9\])(\[a-zA-Z\])-> \1\r\2
Import to Address Book. Define 1st field as 'first name', 2nd field as 'Phone(mobile)'. Uncheck 'Ignore first card'.
Note -- I used this piece of software to find the file format: http://www.versiontracker.com/php/dlpage.php?id=14667&db=mac&pid=25642&kind=&lnk =http%3A%2F%2Fwww.gwenhiver.net%2Fdownloads%2FAddressBookExporter-2.1.2.dmg
I'd love for a few people to send me .pbb files so I can make sure that my solution is universal. You can reach me through the email link on this post.
Message was edited by: eggsyntax
Message was edited by: eggsyntax
Message was edited by: eggsyntax
Message was edited by: eggsyntax
Message was edited by: eggsyntax
Message was edited by: eggsyntax

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