Contacts mysteriously vanished!

hi-
my mail, safari, and address book were all open at the same time. all of a sudden i had to force quit all 3. just to be safe, i restarted and repaired permissions.
upon restart, i noticed that there were no names in my ichat account--just addresses.
i checked my address book and there were no addresses in there at all! just minutes before i had over 300 contacts.
then, i checked my .mac (online) address book--there were only 22 contacts in there.
i ran isync just to see what would happen and only 5 of the contacts updated to my computer.
i have everything backed up in other places, however, this still bugs me. what if i didnt? how did my stuff on .mac get lost?
how did my contacts on the computer vanish?
has anyone else ran into this before?
any help would be appreciated.
thanks a lot!

Unfortunately, the "Address Book Lost Data" bug seems to have been around a while - searching through the discussion here will find plenty of references. Hopefully a fix is in the works.
Just a guess on the path of issues:
1) Address Book lost data.
2) Restart Address Book without saving the ".previous" file.
3) Make one minor change, now there is a new ".previous" file with almost nothing in it.
4) iSync to .Mac account "updates" the .Mac file with all the deletions...
Might be variants on this theme....
I've been using the .Mac Backup program, and believe that insulates me from a true loss since I can back up to a point in time. The "time machine" change coming up in the next OS will make this point moot.

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All of my contacts mysteriously Vanished!

for no reason! All of my contacts are wiped and replaced with a very old set of email addresses!! not even the contacts on my home comp. My favorites are gone. just the numbers are left with no names. ***?? I have no Idea why or how or how to get my phone numbers back. I sync regularly and back up to the cloud. this should not be happening. One thing is that I just recently upgraded to iOS 7, like a month ago.
the only thing I can think of is that I went down to 1% in battery life, which is lower than I usually go but I never actually ran out of power. the phone did not shut down because of lack of power.
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Hi Michael Gorsline1,
I understand that you turned off iCloud on your Mac and subsequently lost all of your contacts, notes, and reminders. If your information, remains on iCloud.com, you can merge that information back onto your Mac by signing back into iCloud and selecting the services you would like to sync.
Apple - iCloud - Learn how to set up iCloud on all your devices.
Best regards,
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There are at least two problems here.
A. In the receiver you should test for -1 from the read() immediately, rather than continue with the loop and try to write -1 bytes to the file.
B. In the sender you are ignoring the return value of client.write(), which can be anything from 0 to the buffer length. If you get 0 you should wait for another OP_WRITE to trigger; if you get a 'short write' you need to retry it until you've got nothing left to write from the current buffer, before you read any more data. This is where the data is vanishing.

Contacts have vanished

My wife has an iPhone 4S, which she has never synced to a computer, nor to iCloud. She was at a high school play last night and texted her sister to see where she was sitting. Then she turned off the ringer and put it in her purse. When the play was over she got a text and noticed it was just the number, and didn't have a name with it. Then she discovered all her contacts were missing. Today, she noticed the battery was dying extremely quickly and she's started getting strange texts from people she doesn't know.
I synced it to my computer to create a backup, but the contacts seem to be gone forever.
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Same thing just happened to me on the same phone! Someone please help us!!!

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go to settings > mail, contacts, and calendars > select add account > then Other > add CardDAV Account >
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Hi, I've iPhone 5. All of a sudden all my contact names are removed from the address book. even though i can see all the numbers with no names associated with it. This came from nowhere. Please help ASAP

m_saadkhan wrote:
The problem is originated from apple itself and should be resolved by apple as well. Is it too much to ask?
I would like to try and put into perspective this statement you've made about 'Apple'., Your contacts were at a point in time on your 'Apple' iphone. That is a given as you would not now be asking about why they have disappeared. To say that at a given point and time they were there and now they are not and THEN to blame apple for this inconsistency is for me at least just a bit much.
So now after me expressing my opinion on your comments lets see if we can't put together some trouble shooting to see if we can't get to your contacts.
IF your contacts were saved to icloud they are still in the icloud only gone from your device. Please read this article about how to use icloud and how to get icloud to send your contacts back to your phone in which they once resided.
http://support.apple.com/kb/ts3998
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Contacts mysteriously vanished!

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