Address book abbu backup import
OSX
Well it appears that Address book in Leopard has got a pretty nasty bug/feature with importing archived address book items.
When I make large changes to my Address Book I have got into the habit of backing up, and with Plaxo and several other services and devices syncing off it I can often need it.
Today somehow my address book contacts got really messed up and I thought “well lucky me I have backups from when it was last in good shape, so no problem, I will just import the backup”. Unfortunately it appears that the import of Address Book archives is broken.
Address Book archives the address book items into a abbu file. This appears to be a special file format that is in reality a folder containing Metadata, images and other files quite like the location:
~/Library/Application Support/AddressBook/ (hidden on my mac for some reason).
When I went to use the import facility it asked whether I wanted to overwrite the existing contacts (I did) but then nothing. There was information in the console, but it was different everytime and not one import. Looking on the web, I could see that I wasn’t the only one with the problem, and there was no solution. So I looked to myself to find out how to get it back.
Now please understand that this isn’t a recommended solution and I don’t know how it could possibly effect someone else if they tried this, so do so at your own risk, but I had nothing to lose.
Firstly, I deleted all the files under ~/Library/Application Support/AddressBook/ with Address Book closed. Then I opened Address Book, I created a new contact, then I imported the abbu file. I got all my contacts back and they all look intact from the last backup.
Then I used Plaxo to sync them back to the service…
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