Merging dupe records in Address Book erases everything

I selected the LOOK FOR DUPLICATE ENTRIES and MERGE DUPLICATE ENTRIES drop down menu commands in Address Book, and after merging, the process bar froze. Upon rebooting, i discovered all my address book records had been deleted . How may I retrieve them? And is this a bug in Address Book, or am i just unlucky?
Mac Book Pro 15" Mac OS X (10.4.6)
Mac Book Pro 15" Mac OS X (10.4.6)

Quit AddressBook.
Look if you can locate one of these files:
youruserhome/library/application support/addressbook/
addressbook.data
addressbook.data.backup
addressbook.data.previous
Look at the sizes of these folders, duplicate them to the desktop as a precaution.
remove addressbook.data and put it in the trash
rename addressbook.data.previous to addressbook.data
Now open AB again and see if this has worked.
If it did, start using the build-in feature to make a backup (file menu)

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Birthdates in Calendar not same as recorded in Address Book. e.g. entered 5 Dec 1974 in Address book but shows as 4 Dec birthdate in calendar? any suggestions please?

Birthdates in Calendar not same as recorded in Address Book. e.g. entered 5 Dec 1974 in Address book but shows as 4 Dec birthdate in calendar? any suggestions please?

You might get a better response in the iSync forum, as your question is about syncing.

Can I merge 2 groups in Address Book?

Hello,
Running Mac OSX Snow Leopard. My Address Book app is syncing fine with an Exchange 2007 server, but now I've got 2 Address Book groups on my machine...one for the Exchange account and another called 'On My Mac'. They are almost identical...so when I view 'All Contacts' everything is duplicated...quite confusing.
Can I merge my 'On My Mac' group into the Exchange group?
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Not that I know of. I am in the same situation. If you want to see just the contacts on your Mac, click on the "on your Mac" item or if you want to see just your exchange contacts, click there. That's what I do. Works fine.

Two Machines, Merge To Make 1 Address Book Without Duplicates

Hello,
So I currently have two computers I use:
MacBook (White) running Snow Leopard
iMac (21.5'') running OSX Lion
I use both computers, and also do email on both. I do email through Sparrow.app which when I add to address book, adds to the local address book. What this has resulted in is that I have 2 address books, both of them have SOME of the same contacts, but some that are not on the other...
My question is how could I merge these while still keeping the most up-to-date ones from each?
Then once they are sync-ed, is there a way to have them automatically update through iCloud (Note, I am willing to upgrade to Lion on my MacBook if this is possible, so that is not a factor)
Thanks!

Great.
I think the TM restore would have been much quicker. I was under the assumption that everything was good on the Mac address book.
Not sure what happened since then. Did you read my post (at 2:01pm above) before things went wrong?
"Try this. Disable iCloud on your mac. Select to keep contacts on the computer when quiting. Verify address book contains all your contacts. If you don't have a backup such as TM, export address book contacts so you will have a backup.
Your address book should have been correct or you could have corrected the contacts then and you would have had the backup files exported if you didn't have or trust TM.
Go to the iCloud website and delete all contacts there.
At the iCloud website, you should have been able to select all addresses at one time and delete. That would have left no addresses in iCloud. Only addresses left should have been on your Mac from the last step.
Once done, go back and log into iCloud on your computer and merge the contacts. The website should now contain the addresses from your address book.
Unless something else was wrong and creating multiple contacts, the only addresses in iCloud would have been merged from what was in your address book on your computer.
I don't know what happened or where we went wrong. I'll check back in the morning if you post any other info.
Hope it works out.

Deduping records in address book

I have many duplicate records since porting various address and email address from my PC to my new Mac. I have tried to dedup the address book by using the pulldown menu item "Look for duplicate entries". However, when I use it, Address Book crashes. I have about 10,000 total records in my address book. Is there some sort of limit or time-out that prevents address book from finding my duplicates?

I don't know why it is crashing, but quite possibly on some badly-formatted contact record. The trouble I find with AB's duplicate finding (and this may have been fixed - I am still on 10.4.9) is that it doesn't tell you which entries are duplicates, so you can't tell if you are about to merge 20 duplicate "John Smith"s - who are in fact different people.
You can try this little script, which I suspect will run very slowly with your big address book, if indeed it doesn't join Address Book in crashing - I have never tried it with more than 500. Also note it is untested on 10.4.11, so use File/Backup before trying it. If you run it as-is, it will list the duplicates it finds in the Script Editor result pane, giving you an opportunity to check before deleting. To allow it to delete, uncomment the "delete APerson" line.
AK
click here to open this script in your editor<pre style="font-family: 'Monaco', 'Courier New', Courier, monospace; overflow:auto; color: #222; background: #DDD; padding: 0.2em; font-size: 10px; width:400px">tell application "Address Book"
set TheLot to {}
set Surplus to {}
set ThePeople to every person
repeat with APerson in ThePeople
if name of APerson is not in TheLot then
set TheLot to TheLot & (name of APerson)
else
set Surplus to Surplus & (name of APerson)
-- delete APerson
end if
end repeat
end tell
Surplus</pre>

Address Book erased

I erased my address book, by mistake, and now I can not sync my iphone thru Entourage as it requires Address Book to be synced also. I have tried to re-install from my discs Tiger, however after all the updates I will have to erease everything to allow the re-install. How can I just install Address Book?

Apple Discussions!
Since the Address Book is a separate app, you should be able to +custom install+ from your System Install Tiger DVD. You do not need to boot from same (hold down the "c" key). Or use Pacifist to help you custom install.

Address Book erased. How can I restore?

I just bought a new iPhone (my first) and synced it to my computer for the first time. My Address Book on my Mac was erased. When I was at AT&T store, the contact information from my old cell phone was transferred to my contact list on my new iPhone. That contact list was transferred to the Address book on my Power Mac but all of the existing contacts were replaced by the contact list on my iPhone. (GULP!) I believe that I located a file in the Address Book directory named: AddressBook.data.previous. I am hoping that I can restore my previous address book to what it was before I synced my iPhone. I also have back up files on an exterior hard drive. How can I restore the old address book, and then, how do I merge it with the contact list that now resides on my new iPhone? I am praying somebody can help me to restore!

Hi BDAqua--
Thank you so much for replying. After writing my message I made several horrible discoveries. Not only had my Address Book been wiped clean, but my iCal was also wiped clean. In addition my Firefox wasn't loading properly so I closed and reopened it and found that it was like opening Firefox for the first time. My personal toolbar and all my bookmarks are gone. Also, I have an email account that utilizes Thunderbird. The email account is gone. I was prompted to create a new account from scratch. Additionally, all my Desktop files are gone, the Dock was missing all of the program icons that I had put there, and configurations that I had set up such as the right mouse click button are all gone!
There was one piece of information that I left out of my description in my first post, and this may be important. When I connected my iPhone to sync for the first time, I was prompted in iTunes if I wanted to name my iphone "Apple User's (or Appleuser's) iPhone". Rather than just put a different name in that field, I blundered by renaming the username in the Finder Sidebar. It was from that point on that I started having the problems. When I renamed it back to "Appleuser" later on, none of the missing items returned.
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Merge iPhoto name with Address Book contact card?

I have a lot of pictures named on iPhoto under faces. But then I just put some contacts in my Address Book and I wanted to know if theres a way to merge the Faces name and the Contact Card. Or maybe if I can just rename all of the Faces at once under one person, and change them to the contact card name? P.S. I am currently running Snow Leopard. But i I need Lion for it, I will be biying it tomorrow anyways=) Thanks anyone who helps!:D

Oh wait! Nevermind! I found I can just rename it! I'm a little new to the Mac:P

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I am a fan of using the many of the Mac OS, iLife and other Apple applications together and just purchased iWork '09. I'd never done mail merges in previous versions of Pages, but I decided to try today with my Address Book data. I stumbled across some problems related to Address Book that have bothered me for some time and wonder if there is a simple go-around. Many of the cards in my Address Book have more than one line in the street address field. For example, they have street and street number in one line and the apartment number in the second. When Pages encounters such vCards in my Address Book, it doesn't know what to do and skips the next line of the address, which includes city, state and zipcode. I have also altered my Address Book template to include such things as the person's college (as I work with lots of college students), but this field is not recognized in Pages' mail merge feature. So, if I put the college name at the beginning of the street field in Address Book (which is what I have done until today), I can get excellent mail labels to print from Address Book, but I now I realize that this causes the mail merge problems in Pages described above. If I list the college elsewhere in the vCard, such as under the guise of "department" (an accepted field for mail merge in Pages), I lose the ability to get accurate mail labels in Address Book. Any ideas?

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Importing records into Address Book

I note the difficulties some have had importing records. I too am having problems. I'm trying to get my Filemaker databases into Address Book so that I can then move them to my iPod. Exporting from Filemaker is fine, and importing into Address Book appears to be. However on closer examination it isn't, as all the records have been imported but not all the fields in all the records. As the import isn't perfect, it's arguably useless.
Anyone else had this experience? Any suggestions as to where the problem lies? And has anyone found the best way to get Filemaker databases onto iPods?
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If you open Address Book, click on Card menuitem and select Edit Template. This will show you what the current template is and what fields may be added to the template.
You can then edit the LDIF file when it's created to select only the desired export fields that will match the template.
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TS4147 merging contact duplicates in address books

I tried merging contact duplicates in my address book thorugh the card- look for duplicates option but it does not seem to recognize any, althoug almost all my contacts are duplicates. Any other suggestions??
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Kris

That command finds duplicates if they are in the Same account, it sounds like you have more than one account, my guess is that you have 2, iCloud and On My Mac, check.

Duplication of Records in Address Book on iPad Sync

I have multiple records which have been duplicated in my Address Book on my desktop Mac; I believe it has arisen since I have been synchronizing between desktop and iPad. How can I eliminate these duplicated record entries and stop this duplication?

Here are some past threads on this problem that may help:
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=11620245&#11620245
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=11678878&#11678878

Duplicates merging and deleting in Address Book

I know Apple Address Book has a "Look for Duplicates" option under the Card menu. I have a lot of contacts I'd like to clean up, and am thinking about using this functionality.
Here's the problem:
Many clean up tools are notoriously unintelligent. There are many contacts in my address book, for example, who have the same name, but different email addresses or phone numbers. For some of them, they are genuinely contacts that need to be merged. For others, they are legitimately different people. Whatever tool I use for cleanups has to allow me the opportunity to review what it thinks should be merged or deleted before it does so.
I went to Card > Look for Duplicates in Address Book, and got a window telling me it found "422 duplicate cards and 409 duplicate entries". I'm worried about pushing the Merge button since I have no idea how Address Book conducts this assessment, and whether or not it will give me an opportunity to review its changes when I push the button. Unfortunately, the help file is not very helpful on this.
Can anyone here offer me some insight into how Address Book identifies duplicate cards and entries, and if there's anyway to review its changes before they're made?
(I know I can create a backup of my Address Book before the processing, and restore afterwards if necessary, but I wouldn't know if I'd need to restore unless I could AT LEAST review a list of all 400ish changes it made.)
Dan

If you have not already tried, I would suggest to not use the address book duplicate merge feature. I just tried it doesn't give you the chance to review anything. All goes automatic and it leaves a complete mess. Merging companies with several people together, merging people with the same last name and phone number together, etc. I restored from a backup copy.

Clicking on a record in address book causes it to hang and eventually crash

There are some strange records in my Address Book that have lots of entries within that entry in the fields (not a record I created) that I'd like to delete, for every time a search ends on that record, Address Book HANGS. Sometimes from Email I can open another record using "Open in Address Book" to get out of the hang, but this is really a serious problem. How can I fix this? I try to export a backup of Address Book and it hangs. What can I do to rescue my Address Book?

HI David,
Try deleting this file.
com.apple.AddressBook.plist
~/Library/Preferences.
Move that file to the Trash and restart your Mac.
Carolyn

Merging "Previous Recipients" to "Address Book"

I want to added email addresses from my "Previous Recipients" list in Mail.app to my Address Book. A lot of the previous recipients are already in my address book but only with name and phone number, not email. The PR list seems to recognize them by name and puts the vCard icon next to them and grays out the "Add to Address Book" button, but does not give any way to add the email to the address book. Since they are not in the address book they don't sync to my iPhone. Is there any way to merge the previous recipient's into my AddressBook? I'd even be happy to do it one address at a time if it didn't take too many clicks. Right now you can't even cut and paste the email. I just want to get the emails for the people in my address book, not every random person I have ever sent email to. I have OS X 10.6.6 and latest version of Mail and AddressBook.

I may finally be getting my head on straight, and understanding the problem of sequence of events -- I have been dense.
I had understood you to say that adding a fresh contact from Previous Recipients did not add the email address, but not realizing you had contacts for the individuals in the AB which were devoid of email addresses. I have no entries in my AB that do not have email addresses, but I would have thought the add to addressbook would have created a whole new entry in the AB, but creating something of a duplicate entry? I would not expect the entry to be new but devoid of email address -- are you reporting that this is case, and that the old contact with phone number is also there?
What is most peculiar to me, is that the vCard icon appears beside an entry, but per your report that email address is not in the AB -- per Mail Help, I would expect the match to only be made on email address and not on name.
I will have see if a test or two can be create? to better understand, and to then possibly find some resolution.
Ernie

Merging dupe records in Address Book erases everything

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