HT2486 Address book data loss / iMac 10.5.8 / despite backing up on a NAS all data lost, including in the backup. How can I retrieve it? Thanks

Help! All my address book data disappeared from one day to the next. I entered my NAS back-up but all the address books going back in time are empty.
Then I got clever and thought I would sync my contacts from my iPhone 4 to my iMac. Brilliant idea - now all my iPhone contacts are gone as well except for 14 address that must have been input after my last sync with iTunes.
Can anyone help my find my lost data?
Thanks
Paul
P.S. all help appreciated, especially in simple English as I am not a techi!

Paul, get one of these...
Find Any File...
http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/30079/find-any-file
I'd get EasyFind...
http://www.devon-technologies.com/download/
Search your whole drive for...
AddressBook.data
Do we find a bigger one?

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Address Book data lost w/ OS 10.4.3 Upgrade

I have just D/L and installed OSX 10.4.3 from OSX 10.4 and all data from the address book has dissapeared!!
I dont know if it has affected any other parts Data installed as i dont use anything else...
Any ideas where it's gone??
PBG4 Mac OS X (10.4.3)

Had the same problem and I've posted my own topic.
I find it very disturbing that you can lose all your contacts, and I hope you had a back up. I was lucky because a backup was made three days earlier so I only lost three days of new addresses (not much).
Hope you find your contacts
Rob Buck

Address book data is XML-encoded in LDAP ?

Hi,
We are trying to find out how address book data is stored in the LDAP, and we've found several different ways apparently. Some format seems to use an XML encoded format (this is when you go in the UWC (JES5) and add a new group and in stead of selecting contacts to add, you just type a name, and an email address).
This is how it looks like in the ldap:
absi@nagios ~/ $ ldapsearch -D "cn=Directory manager" -w Jxxxxxxxxxx -b "o=PiServerDb" -h 192.168.xxx.50 "displayname=test_manueel"
version: 1
dn: piEntryID=e115cc045b373f,piPStoreOwner=adresboekadmin,o=xxxxxxxxxxxxxxt.be
,o=PiServerDb
piEntryID: e115cc045b373f
objectClass: PITYPEGROUP
objectClass: piEntry
objectClass: top
memberOfPIBook: e114db3c213216f6
displayName: test_manueel
pipEntryXMLData:: PG9saT4KIDxHcm91cEV4TWVtYmVyPnRlc3QzJTVFU01UUCU1RXRlc3QzJTQ
wdmxhYW1zcGFybGVtZW50LmJlPC9Hcm91cEV4TWVtYmVyPgogPEdyb3VwRXhNZW1iZXI+a2llcmV
3aWV0JTVFU01UUCU1RWtpZXJld2lldCU0MHZsYWFtc3BhcmxlbWVudC5iZTwvR3JvdXBFeE1lbWJ
lcj4KIDxHcm91cEV4TWVtYmVyPnRlc3Q0NSU1RVNNVFAlNUV0ZXN0NDUlNDBhYnNpLmJlPC9Hcm9
1cEV4TWVtYmVyPgo8L29saT4K
However, I can't find any usable reference to this ldap attribute 'pipEntryXMLData' , except that it's used by JES 2005Q1 onwards
I'm also concerned by the following:
- in case of problems, are there tools to read out / export this XML data in anything that is human readable / parseable ?
- what about scalability, we will be having members with thousands of entries in their addressbook, is this method scalable or will we be experiencing delays when users are looking up contacts in their address books ?
All info on this is more than welcom!
regards,
Tom.

The ldapsearch tools are producing LDIF format (RFC 2849) which requires that non ascii values and values with some specific characters be Base64 encoded.
XML is out of these formats that start with a special character with regards to LDIF ('<') and for which values must be base64 encoded.
There are many decoders for base64 encoding.
Alternately, you can use an LDAP API (C or Java) and the value will not be encoded.
Regards,
Ludovic.

Address book data is XML-encoded ?

Hi,
We are trying to find out how address book data is stored in the LDAP, and we've found several different ways apparently. Some format seems to use an XML encoded format (this is when you go in the UWC (JES5) and add a new group and in stead of selecting contacts to add, you just type a name, and an email address).
This is how it looks like in the ldap:
absi@nagios ~/ $ ldapsearch -D "cn=Directory manager" -w Jxxxxxxxxxx -b "o=PiServerDb" -h 192.168.xxx.50 "displayname=test_manueel"
version: 1
dn: piEntryID=e115cc045b373f,piPStoreOwner=adresboekadmin,o=xxxxxxxxxxxxxxt.be
,o=PiServerDb
piEntryID: e115cc045b373f
objectClass: PITYPEGROUP
objectClass: piEntry
objectClass: top
memberOfPIBook: e114db3c213216f6
displayName: test_manueel
pipEntryXMLData:: PG9saT4KIDxHcm91cEV4TWVtYmVyPnRlc3QzJTVFU01UUCU1RXRlc3QzJTQ
wdmxhYW1zcGFybGVtZW50LmJlPC9Hcm91cEV4TWVtYmVyPgogPEdyb3VwRXhNZW1iZXI+a2llcmV
3aWV0JTVFU01UUCU1RWtpZXJld2lldCU0MHZsYWFtc3BhcmxlbWVudC5iZTwvR3JvdXBFeE1lbWJ
lcj4KIDxHcm91cEV4TWVtYmVyPnRlc3Q0NSU1RVNNVFAlNUV0ZXN0NDUlNDBhYnNpLmJlPC9Hcm9
1cEV4TWVtYmVyPgo8L29saT4K
However, I can't find any usable reference to this ldap attribute 'pipEntryXMLData' , except that it's used by JES 2005Q1 onwards
I'm also concerned by the following:
- in case of problems, are there tools to read out / export this XML data in anything that is human readable / parseable ?
- what about scalability, we will be having members with thousands of entries in their addressbook, is this method scalable or will we be experiencing delays when users are looking up contacts in their address books ?
All info on this is more than welcom!
regards,
Tom.

Hi,
tom_absi wrote:
We are trying to find out how address book data is stored in the LDAP, and we've found several different ways apparently. Some format seems to use an XML encoded format (this is when you go in the UWC (JES5) and add a new group and in stead of selecting contacts to add, you just type a name, and an email address).This isn't surprising as there wasn't any pre-existing attribute which could be used to add these values. So it appears they are using an XML 'blob' instead.
This is how it looks like in the ldap:
pipEntryXMLData:: PG9saT4KIDxHcm91cEV4TWVtYmVyPnRlc3QzJTVFU01UUCU1RXRlc3QzJTQ
wdmxhYW1zcGFybGVtZW50LmJlPC9Hcm91cEV4TWVtYmVyPgogPEdyb3VwRXhNZW1iZXI+a2llcmV
3aWV0JTVFU01UUCU1RWtpZXJld2lldCU0MHZsYWFtc3BhcmxlbWVudC5iZTwvR3JvdXBFeE1lbWJ
lcj4KIDxHcm91cEV4TWVtYmVyPnRlc3Q0NSU1RVNNVFAlNUV0ZXN0NDUlNDBhYnNpLmJlPC9Hcm9
1cEV4TWVtYmVyPgo8L29saT4KThis is base64 encoded and decodes as (http://www.opinionatedgeek.com/dotnet/tools/Base64Decode/):
<oli>
<GroupExMember>test3%5ESMTP%5Etest3%40vlaamsparlement.be</GroupExMember>
<GroupExMember>kierewiet%5ESMTP%5Ekierewiet%40vlaamsparlement.be</GroupExMember>
<GroupExMember>test45%5ESMTP%5Etest45%40absi.be</GroupExMember>
</oli> However, I can't find any usable reference to this ldap attribute 'pipEntryXMLData' , except that it's used by JES 2005Q1 onwardsAppears to be a 'private' attribute. Although you can access the data because it is stored in an LDAP server I don't believe it is a public interface so it is bound to change.
I'm also concerned by the following:
- in case of problems, are there tools to read out / export this XML data in anything that is human readable / parseable ?The base64 decoded version seems parseable to me?
- what about scalability, we will be having members with thousands of entries in their addressbook, is this method scalable or will we be experiencing delays when users are looking up contacts in their address books ?Assuming you have a sufficiently scoped/tuned directory server I don't see there is going to be a problem.
Regards,
Shane.

Exporting/importing Address Book data

Hi;
Can we someone please tell me how to transfer my Address Book data from a G4 tower to a newer G5 tower? Thanks so much. -bjgroup.

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Mail and address book data file location

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I have just followed your instructions for restoring Mail and Address Book files after I did an Erase and Istall. I didn't do a restore from my back up but reinstalled all the software from discs and am carefully bringing files back into my clean laptop bit by bit.
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Now my 13 year old LaCie 1 Gig and my 4 GiG IBM still run perfectly in my PM 6100. Those were huge drives in their day. Back ups in those, a piece of cake. Drop and drag. I had backups all over the place. The complaint I have on OS X, why should data that is so vital be scattered to a lot of shareware, which each person and reasonably so says this is good . Yes we have now come to Time Machine and it will have some growing pains, but I hope this is the last of worrying about my data, the loss of data, wasted time looking for it. I guess when you spend $3500.00 2 years ago, you have some confidence, yes it's just a machine and can break, but some confidence is expected I guess.
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Once on iCloud how do you recover lost address book data?

After moving to iCloud my wife suddenely lost all her contact info earlier today. When opening Address Book on her iMac & iPad all contact info was gone. We signed on to iCloud.com and it was gone there too. For some reason it was still on her iPhone. I tried to force a merge from her phone by shutting off iCloud Contacts; selecting to keep data on the device; then turned it back on hoping to get the 'merge data' option. I didn't get that message and sure enough in a few seconds the address book on her phone went empty.
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RickTexas wrote:
So this gets back to my original question... not sure if bgbrobru is running Time Machine backups, but even if he is, I don't think the Address Book data is recoverable (unless you go back to a pre-iCloud backup) because it is no longer stored locally.
If I understand correctly the only thing we can do going forward is to run a periodic 'manual' export of iCal and Address Book data to insure we have a backup? In the event I do something stupid and mistakingly delete something or - like what happened to my wife today - the entire address book (or calendar entries) just disapear, we are screwed? I guess this would also apply to email stored in folders on iCloud?
Seems there should be some way to capture the iCloud data in a Time Machine (or some other mechanism) backup?
Sorry Rick but that's incorrect,
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Boot from the older version of OSX, then in AB use the File>Export>Export vCard after selecting all in AB.
Then boot from the new OSx & use the new AB to import that VCF file.

HT2486 Address book data loss / iMac 10.5.8 / despite backing up on a NAS all data lost, including in the backup. How can I retrieve it? Thanks

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