Nothing is more frustrating than losing information from your computer! That's why we backup in the first place right? However, what if you lost information that wasn't obvious right away? That's what happened to me recently with Mac OS X's Address Book. I keep all my contacts (around 750) updated in Address Book. So at first glance if the total number of contacts is about 750 (which is displayed at the bottom of the Address Book window), I figure I'm good! I sync Address Book with my .Mac account, my iPods and my Treo 650 smartphone. This way I can look up a contact just about anywhere that I happen to be. All is good!

One day something went haywire with the syncing process!

All of a sudden I lost "some" email addresses on my contacts. What's weird is that it was only the home email addresses and it was only on about 1/3rd of my contacts. I of course didn't notice that they were gone right away. Once I discovered this problem, it was too late to recover from a backup. I had already backed up my computer again (and again) which had now backed up the contacts WITHOUT the email addresses. I booted from my backup drive just to make sure and they were gone from there too. So it took a good part of a day to go through each contact one by one and put the email addresses back in manually from various other sources that still had the email addresses intact. Luckily one of my iPods hadn't been sync'd in a while and it still had the few missing email addresses that I didn't have anywhere else. Once I got my contacts back to 100% the way I wanted them I then did the following:

1. Open Address Book
2. Choose Backup Address Book from the File Menu
3. Save the Backed up Address Book file created in step 2 to some other location than your hard drive. Either your backup drive, file server or iDisk comes to mind.

Now let's say your Address Book file gets hosed. You can open Address Book and choose Revert to Address Book backup!

Now let's say that only some of your contacts get screwed up and you only want to fix the ones that are messed up. You can either revert the entire file back to your backup as in the step above OR you can create another user account on your Mac and revert that user's address book back to your backup to get all the contacts back. Then you can extract just the vCards for the contacts you want to fix out of that user and copy them back over to your main user.

Lesson learned! In addition to backing up my entire hard drive on a regular basis, I now keep a separate backup of my contacts that stays intact no matter what.

As I use Entourage, with Office 2004, is there a similar way to back-up my contacts in the address book in Entourage and all of its e-mail addresses?

Marty

Entourage users can use the Export command from the File menu and export (local) Contacts into an Entourage Archive file.

quote:

Originally posted by Marty:
As I use Entourage, with Office 2004, is there a similar way to back-up my contacts in the address book in Entourage and all of its e-mail addresses?

Marty

You can backup iCal the same way as with Address Book. I try to remember to backup before doing any major changes or syncing with my Palm. Haven't had a problem since switching to Missing Sync, but the standard sync messed me up more than once, duplicating and triplicating some entries.

I use The Missing Sync 5 also (I LOVE THIS APP). I would recommend that users when they switch to the Missing Sync that they use the first sync to REPLACE the contents of the Palm with what's on the Mac. This seemed to smooth things out for me.

quote:

Originally posted by Phyllis Evans:
You can backup iCal the same way as with Address Book. I try to remember to backup before doing any major changes or syncing with my Palm. Haven't had a problem since switching to Missing Sync, but the standard sync messed me up more than once, duplicating and triplicating some entries.

Hi there ....Hand up in the back of the room.

If you are backing up the whole hard drive why would you have to do a seperate on for the Address book. Would it not be included in the whole drive backup?

Easier to restore from an application backup than a system-wide backup if something becomes corrupted.

Yes, much. i have "too many" e-mail addresses - at least .Mac thinks so. Only the first 10 or so get sent up to .Mac. Sometimes it decided to whack the extra ones I have, so I re-import my vCard. Other times sync occasionally goes nuts and whacks all kinds of stuff (like happened to Terry). So it's just easier for me to occasionaly back up the Address Book and calendars.

The problem with full system backups (unless you do incremental backups) is that if the data on your drive gets corrupted and you don't catch it before your next backup, you'll backup the corrupted data too! That's kinda what happened to me and my address book. By the time I noticed the data was screwy, I had already backed up a screwy version of it.

quote:

Originally posted by Calvin:
Hi there ....Hand up in the back of the room.

If you are backing up the whole hard drive why would you have to do a seperate on for the Address book. Would it not be included in the whole drive backup?

And that's the reason that I do multiple backups. I have a full mirror that only backs up only when I tell it to. My user partition is backed up automatically every morning.