Lost all Contacts in Address Book

I had over 500 contacts in my Address Book. Recently I had a problem with my iPhone and the Apple Store gave me a new one. I synched it with my computer a couple of times and ended up with duplicates of my contacts. I manually removed the duplicates on my phone. I also have a MobileMe account set to synch my contacts, mail, calendar. A couple of days ago I realized that my Address Book on my Mac was empty. All contacts gone! I tried to restore them from Time Machine but it only brought back 40 contacts. I've spent hours with online support for MobileMe. No help at all. New contacts put on the iPhone and Calendar items do synch back to my iMac. AppleCare for iPhone couldn't help me either. I've been a .mac user for a couple of years and have backups going back that far but no has been able to tell me how to recover my Contacts file. Any ideas?

Mobile Me has had such bad issues over the past week or two...
With address book on the Mac, you simply select all the contacts and drag them on to your desktop and this will make one big Address book export file, that'll enable you to save and import it later on...
however it sounds like you are past that point, have you looked deep in to you ~/library folder for any scraps of data??? sadly, it sounds like it's gone, I had the same thing on launch day of Mobile Me... the MobileMe cloud deleted EVERYTHING, thank goodness I had a backup of the address book from a few months ago...
Time Machine is one of the most buggy backup softwares I've ever used, and wouldn't recommend it for any serious user yet.
I'm sorry this is probably not the news you want to hear!!!
Have you ever made backups manually NOT using time machine???
http://www.iphoneuserguide.com

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