Hi there,
I have managed to stupidly delete all my contacts from my address book and my cellphone with iSync and was wondering if anyone knew of a way I could get them back from the ‘datasync.db’ file??
A friend of mine used his phone with my iSync and over-wrote all my addresses in my address book, so trying to get mine back onto my mac from my cellphone I deleted my address book’s contents and ran iSync again. This replaced the 180 contacts on my cellphone with the empty addressbook from my mac. Yay!
So now they don’t exist anywhere.
Except, doing a bit of digging I came across the datasync.db file in my Library and opened it in Textedit and amongst all the computerspeak I can see some names and numbers from my old addressbook.
So I was wondering if anyone knew if there was some way of extracting these contacts from this datasync.db file because I can’t make enough sense from it using textedit. Some sort of script to recreate all my Vcards would be awesome!!
Cheers, hope someone can save me!
Ben
I found this on another website: –
http://jpgeek.blogspot.com/2006/11/restoring-addressbookapp-contact.html
The “Howto” for Restoring your lost contact entries:
First of all, when iSyncing any device with your local databases, backups are created. However, those backups are not accessible and not easy to restore, at least for the “common” user. This is a guide on how to restore the backed up AddressBook database. The method is as follows: – Make sure you’re in Finder, if you’re not sure what Finder is, just click on an empty space on the desktop of your operating system (Mac OS X is assumed to be your OS). – Do the following key combination: “Command + Shift + G”. In the textbox that appears, type the following: ~/Library/Application Support/AddressBook – In the Finder window that opens, there will be a certain number of files and directories. The ones relevant to us are the files named AddressBook.data which represent your current addressbook database entries and AddressBook.data.previous, which is the backup made by iSync before things got ugly (referring to one of the two examples above). – Before proceeding any further, it would be a good idea to make a backup of both files AddressBook.data and AddressBook.data.previous. – Once the files have been safely backed up in another directory or maybe even on your USB Flash disk, rename AddressBook.data to something like AddressBook.data.7_Nov_2006 (the appended date is not necessary but is useful for future reference). We could have named the file AddressBook.data.my_current_manual_backup and it would not matter. – Then rename the AddressBook.data.previous file to AddressBook.data – The next step is to relaunch AddressBook.app and you should see your erased contacts back where they belong.
Thanks Riz your solution just saved me 400 contacts – some how wiped. Nokia N95 doesn’t seem to work as well as presious N73 – or I must have clicked on some setting by mistake. Thanks again.
Thanks Riz! I did the same thing as Robert earlier today.
please halp to recover my address book from yahoo
I can not find the files you are talking about, All I fin dare the images linked to the contacts but no data in the meta data
good man – nice smooth fix.
THANK YOU SOOOOO MUCH. Fixing my bosses cell, merging two into one, and i almost lost all her contacts. thank you for the knowledge.
thank you so much! I was about to cry if I lost all my contacts!
My Sprint RL-4930 went dead after the alarm vibrated it off a dresser onto a wood floor. Is there a chip inside the phone that can be removed and transferred into an identical phone to replace the lost contacts?
If someone knows how to do this, please send me an e-mail, I would really appreciate it!
Thanks
I have followed the instructions above – but to no avail is it working for me. i changed the file name in the ctrl + I – and when i opened the address book it didn’t work – anyone – can you please help me….thanks, andrea