Where are contacts in my Personal Addresses file and why do my email addresses differ than the ones I reinstalled in my Personal Address file?

Question

I lost my Personal Address file in Cyber Space and all of my contacts. I reinstalled my contact information into a new Personal Address file and want to make sure I save a copy of the file in case the file gets lost again.
Also, when I created a new email and typed in the first few letters of the address contact, it automatically opened up the persons contact but in a form that is different than what I entered into my personal address book and is not able to be sent. It showed the email address as, <" m*****"@hotmail.com> . There is the symbol " in front of their email name and in front of the @ symbol in the email address, which is not what I installed in my personal address book. I had these kind of emails in the Collected Addresses file which I'm guessing caused my problem to start with. I do not need to have a Collected Address file. Somehow I must have hit the wrong keyboard key and created this problem. I do not want to uninstall and reinstall Thunderbird in fear of loosing all of my contacts again. I spent two days reinstalling my contacts in the Personal Address file and even then information is missing. So now I have to contact everyone and request phone numbers and home addresses and install all of them again.
As a final note, I deleted all of the addresses in the Collected Addresses file. Can you tell me where they may be saved at so I can make sure they are gone and not interfering with my new Address Book and function of my email account?

Answer 1

The Personal Address Book is stored in your local disk drive; "cyber space" doesn't come into it.
Was it just the Address Book that was lost? Did your email account settings remain intact? Or did you lose the entire profile?
All of your data is stored in a set of files known as the profile. It's unusual for just one element of it to go missing. Any query about saving or protecting data will generally be answered by guiding you to backup your entire profile.
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profiles-tb
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Files_and_folders_in_the_profile_-_Thunderbird
It's possible to single out address book files for independent backup, but you'll need to surgically dissect them from your profile and know where to insert them in order to restore them.
PAB → abook.mab
CA → history.mab
user defined address books → abook-''n''.mab where ''n'' is a number
A safer option for a partial backup might be to export the relevant address books.
In the Address Book, select an address book, then go to '''Tools|Export''', enter where you want the exported addresses to go. Repeat for each address book you want to preserve.
Thunderbird likes the LDIF file format which exports and imports cleanly. The main alternative, CSV, is good for transporting data to or from other address books, but you'll have to take care to get the imported data to feed into the correct data fields. For instance, many users find that their email addresses are posted into the Nickname field. Have you checked your address books to confirm that all the data are where they should be?
The Collected Addresses book, IMHO is like the lint filter in a tumble dryer. Best way to use it is to keep it empty; periodically examine it, move useful addresses to a proper address book and dispose of the cruft you don't need. If you let it grow, you'll have trouble finding the really useful addresses in amongst all the chaff.
There is an add-on that might recover a deleted address book, but I can't recall which one it is. Hopefully someone else will chip in?
sfhowes? ;-)