Contacts going missing?

TidBITS Talk
1

Apologies, but I am FURIOUS. About a week ago I found one of my contact pages mysteriously disappeared… it happened to have many phone number for those associated with the main business. All totally gone. NOW a contact I added a few weeks ago has gone missing. The hell is going on here?

Suppose I might run this down from backups, might anyine know the name and location of the file that houses one’s contacts? Not sure I have much hope because long ago I told it to make sure and keep them in the cloud so I could have access ffrom my 2 mobile devices… but at least it’s something to do.

2

sync source you’re using?? iCloud, at least can restore contacts. I think it’s all or nothing.

Best to take a backup of your current set of contacts, restore from the right backup set on iCloud.com, pull the contacts you’re missing, and then restore the original set and add the missing contacts. Bit of a pain.

Many other sync services have backups as well.

3

In addition to cloud backup, Contacts (and Calendar) on a Mac has an archiving function: File/ Export/ Archive

This saves an archive file on the Mac and is recommended for extra redundancy, particularly since corrupted data can sometimes overwrite cloud data. With archive files you can go back to previous versions.

Time Machine will also have previous data but the archive function is easier to access.

4

But note that Google says it isn’t so simple to import a Contents archive back into Contacts. The problem is that iCloud is The Truth, and it doesn’t like what you’re about to do.

Google says that you must:

  1. Turn off Contacts in iCloud on the computer.
  2. Import the .abbu file. This replaces all of your contacts.
  3. Export the contacts you want to restore as vCards.
  4. Import the vCards into iCloud.com.
  5. Turn iCloud synching back on for Contacts.
5

The suggestion given by Michael Paine is a good one, and applies to all databases that Apple use, including things like text replacements; or anything that is important to you. Where you can backup, do so.

With respect to contacts specifically, as a general withdrawal from iCloud, I sync contacts locally across the Mac and my two devices in the Finder when I backup them up to the Mac. This has proved to be reliable, so far.