Backing Up And Exporting Address Book Contacts 4
Tip
Hey
This questions was asked a couple of days ago. The emailer wanted a way to backup there address book contacts for backup purposes. The problem with this exporting process on Address Book is that it takes a long time to export the cards individually . This is a big problem since we never have a lot of time. There is a semi-simple way to export Address Book Contacts, without it taking all day.
The first step is open address book go to File > Export > Address Book Archive. When you hit OK, this will export every single vCard file in your address book and place it in a special file. This special file contains all of your contacts.
You can then save this file somewhere safe and you are done. If you want to look inside the file hit “Show Package Contents”. Inside this file you can find all of the meta data associated with the contacts, plus all of the images and other bits and bobs needed to build a contact. Unfortunately you can’t use this files in other programs. The .abcdp (I am sure the programmer was bored) in other apps. It would have been better if the files were exported as vCards, make life a lot more useful.
If you want to keep up with the latests post from Mac Tricks And Tips I recommend you subscribe to the RSS Feed.
Where To Next?
4 Responses to “Backing Up And Exporting Address Book Contacts”
-
1
I backup my addressBook Data simply by backing up the folder home => library => Appl suport => AddressBook; works well; if you need to restore in another Mac, just put the backuped contents in this same folder in this new mac!
Christoph
Comment By Christoph Abermann on November 18th, at 12:03 pm
-
2
I have had a problem where my addressbook corrupts itself, and this can cause some serious problems with my iphone as well (the full corruption was transfered to my iphone, and I couldn’t get contacts back until I reset the phone to factory).
I don’t have an external drive capable of doing time machine backups right now (it’s on the list). So what I did was to write a shell script that used ‘tar’ to tar the addressbook files and save 4 copies of them. I then used cron to run this every day, and each day the new backup replaced 1 of the old backup copies.
Here is the shell script:
cp addressbook.backup.3 addressbook.backup.4
cp addressbook.backup.2 addressbook.backup.3
cp addressbook.backup.1 addressbook.backup.2
cp addressbook.backup addressbook.backup.1
tar czf addressbook.backup /Users/bryan/Library/Application\ Support/AddressBook/I placed this script in my documents in a folder called auto-phone_backup. and had cron execute from there.
30 4 * * * /Users/bryan/Documents/auto-phone_backup/address_backup.sh
It’s not a great script and system, but it provides me with some security and this time if my address book corrupts, I will loose, at most, 1 day of updates.
Comment By Bryan on November 19th, at 4:26 pm
-
3
hmmm, I do it in a very simple way.
Open Adress Book, click on All, then cmd+A (Select all) inside colums “name”, all your contacts are now selected. Then choose File > Export. All your contacts are now stored in a file called vCards.vcf that is saved wherever you want it to be. You can check that every contact is included by hitting space bar when the file is selected, QuickLook will show its content. All it takes is about 3 seconds :-)Comment By nathalie on November 25th, at 10:43 am
-
4
Address Book Problems
Thanks for your posts guys…
My problem is that my Address Book is to big (.abbu) and comes up a message telling exactly this: TO BIG.
Than I can’t import into the iMac.If I go to Metadata file and copy the .abdcp files something curious happens, when I paste in another file (external HD) to transport to the iMac… the .abcdp files assume the double of the size of the original files. I’m scare to copy those .abcdp files in the iMac and generate more problems. :P
Some tips?
Happens this same thing with somebody else?
thanks in advanceComment By Ammi on March 21st, at 3:18 am