Comments on: Backing Up And Exporting Address Book Contacts

By: Ammi

Ammi — Sun, 21 Mar 2010 02:18:31 +0000

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 advance

By: nathalie

nathalie — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 09:43:09 +0000

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 :-)

By: Bryan

Bryan — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 15:26:20 +0000

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.

By: Christoph Abermann

Christoph Abermann — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 11:03:08 +0000

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