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B Gallagher · 07:54 AM

Hello all,

I just had a strange problem - address book deleted all my contacts!

I have no idea why, at all.

I was using it this afternoon to update some info for some people, and had it running. I then moved from my bed to my desk, and in doing so, closed the lid of the PB so that it was only 5 degrees or so open. Still, OS was still running, it did not go to sleep.

When got it back to my desk, the screen went blank as it sometimes does when the PB's not being used for a while (ie. the "turn off screen when not in use for # minutes" feature). The mouse didn't work to get the screen back on, I had to hit the keyboard.

Now, I've been using it for a couple of hours since then, doing other things, and wanted to go back and quit address book since I had it running in the background. When I went to do so, however, I found that all the contacts aside from Apple Computer Inc. and my user account's details had been deleted. And I have no idea why.

I thought this might be a bug, so i restarted, only to find that all my contacts are still gone.

I couldn't have deleted them myself - I just tried making a new contact and deleting them, and it comes up with a warning message "are you sure you want to delete the card "Name"?"! Believe me, if I saw that come up I would make sure I clicked cancel. Once I noticed this, i also went to Edit, and there was no "Undo Delete Record(s)" option available. The undo button was greyed out...

One thing i noticed when I was working in Address Book this afternoon was, when I was filling in the details of a new person. I would select a field (first name, surname, phone, email, etc), and start to type. The text would stay in the selected field for less than a second (it only seemed to be the first character), and then everything else I typed would jump down into the Notes: field at the bottom. If I went out of editing the new contact and then went back in, this problem went away, but I'm just wondering if it might have been related.

Does anyone have any idea what's happened, and if there is any way I can fix it/get my contacts back/stop it from happening in the future? I have a backup of my contacts from around 4 months ago when I migrated from PC, so that's not a problem.. it's just annoying, Sigh,,

Thanks in advance for any suggestions anyone might have.

JKT · Jan 17, 2006, 12:25 PM

This was a reported issue at MacFixIt.com for some people and 10.4.3 when it was first released. I can't recall what the fix was, but you should find that your contacts haven't actually been deleted, they have simply become inaccessible to Address Book for some reason. You could try searching the macfixit.com and Apple KB sites for more info.