[ghporter]

As the title says, my iPhone 4's address book is now totally empty after last night's download of the iOS 5 update. I downloaded and installed 5 on my iPad 2, but it was getting late, so I only downloaded the update for the phone before going to bed. Now my phone's address book is empty. I didn't notice it before leaving the house, so I don't know if my iMac's address book, or the iPad's book are empty as well.

Why "download then install" instead of just "install?" As indicated in several forums' discussions of the update, clicking on "install" made the download for my iPad crawl, so I canceled the install, ejected and reconnected the iPad, and used the "download only" button for the update. The install process was quite lengthy, so when I got started for the iPhone and the "install" ran really slowly, I figured I'd do the phone like the iPad, and just download the update overnight, then install install it today after work.

Aside from the empty address book, the phone is perfectly fine and working like a champ...

Anyone else run into this sort of weirdness? I know the phone got backed up at least twice, so I'm not worried about losing anything, but it's pretty startling when you see your once extensive address book completely blank!

[subego]

Is it possible it's syncing with your (empty) iCloud account? My calendars disappeared until I transferred my MobileMe account over.

[ghporter]

Looks like that's the case-with the iPad, not the phone. My iMac's Address Book is empty too... I hope this doesn't mean that I've completely lost all those address entries!

[subego]

Oooh. That doesn't sound good.

[ghporter]

From some not-so-relaxed web searching, I found that this is not terribly rare...

I strongly recommend backing up one's Address Book before updating to iOS 5. It seems that some have lost their address books in upgrading to Lion, so somehow it looks l Ike the Address Book is pretty fragile. Or Apple isn't paying enough attention to not buggering up users' address records with software or OS updates...

[Cold Warrior]

Do you have a time machine backup? You may be able to restore just the address book or perhaps dog through the path and find its database. For me it appears as ~/library/app support/addressbook/addressbook....abcddb

[subego]

Is it my imagination, or does this all feel very... Microsoft?

[-Q-]

Don't know about it feeling very "microsoft" but it does get tiring that, yet again, Apple can't get their online service working without major hassles on the part of their users. I'm just glad they're not charging people for it.

[subego]

Alleged Steve quote to the MobileMe team:

Steve: What is MobileMe supposed to do?
MobileMe Team answers.
Steve: Then why the **** doesn't it do that?

I understand that in the same meeting he called MobileMe a disgrace to Apple's good name.

[ghporter]

Originally Posted by Cold Warrior 

Do you have a time machine backup? You may be able to restore just the address book or perhaps dog through the path and find its database. For me it appears as ~/library/app support/addressbook/addressbook....abcddb

Sadly, I hacen't had my Time Machine external drive available since about February - when I had to evacuate my study because of a water leak, etc. So I am seriously delinquent in backups through that method.

On the other hand, I had synced my Address Book with Entourage recently enough that I was able to repopulate Address Book with all the important data (though all the pictures I had associated with people on my phone have to be re-added). This is the very first time that I've been glad Microsoft didn't draw from the OS X system for addresses. Likewise, Gmail and Yahoo have various levels of "recent" address lists from me, but I expect to actively establish multiple backups of this sort of thing, with my Address Book archives stored via Evernote and Dropbox, just in case the "cloud" evaporates unexpectedly.