[Koralatov]

I'm having a problem with Address Book.app on my iBook. I've made a backup of my iMac's Address Book database (which is my main copy--I periodically synchronise the iBook over USB flash drive), but it doesn't seem to be working any more. The iMac is on Leopard, the iBook on Tiger.

When I import the back-up into the iBook's Address Book, it doesn't actually add the new contacts to it; instead, it only imports the contacts that I made when I was still on Tiger. Anything added since I upgraded to Leopard doesn't appear on the iBook copy. Is anyone else having this problem, and does anyone know how to solve it?

[dogstar]

Yes, I'm having the exact same problem. And no, I don't know how to fix it...but I'll let you know if I find out.

[Koralatov]

A shameless bump because this problem is still plaguing me. Any ideas? Anyone?

[Big Mac]

Although the vcards should theoretically be backward compatible, It's not too surprising that one could run into trouble in attempting to import to the older version of Address Book. I wish I knew of a solution for you guys. Are you doing the import manually, and if so, have you tried iSync?

[Koralatov]

Originally Posted by Big Mac 

Although the vcards should theoretically be backward compatible, It's not too surprising that one could run into trouble in attempting to import to the older version of Address Book. I wish I knew of a solution for you guys. Are you doing the import manually, and if so, have you tried iSync?

Thanks for the answer. I've been doing it manually, because my phone doesn't play nice with iSync, which is a major pain.

I just did a swift google and came up with Export Address Book 1.4.3 on Apple's site. It's something of a kludge (I imagine I'll lose all the pictures) but it might be my only hope.

[M14Chen]

After much effort, I found a way to export Address book data from Leopard to Tiger.

Here are two methods that will not work:
1. Copying the data in username/Library/Application Support/AddressBook directly to the machine running Tiger.
2. Exporting the Leopard Address Book Archive to Tiger.
In both cases, after you import into Tiger, you will find that new entries made under Leopard will not show up.

I was able to move data including notes and pictures over to Tiger by using a group vCard. Even cards in a mixture of languages will transfer properly.
1. Make sure that you select vCard Format 3.0 on both machines under Address Book Preferences. Using 2.1 may not get the pictures, and cards containing other languages like Chinese will lose the non English text.
2. Make sure that the appropriate language encodings are selected on both machines.
3. Under Leopard, select the All group and select the menu File>Export Group vCards...
4. Delete the username/Library/Application Support/Address Book folder in the Tiger machine if you do not want a lot of duplicate cards.
5. Import the Group vCard file and start Address Book.

The only major limitation with this procedure is that the groups will not be transferred over. For cards that belong to groups, you will find the following text appended in notes: CATEGORIES:group a, group b etc
You can use this data to reconstitute your groups under Tiger