Recover deleted contacts in address book

[Marcel_MRQUIS]

Version: 2004
Operating System: Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger)
Processor: Intel
Email Client: pop

All my contacts were deleted by accident. Can I recover them somehow if they had not been archived.

 

[Diane Ross]

All my contacts were deleted by accident. Can I recover them somehow if they
had not been archived.

Sorry, the answer is no. Let this be a learning lesson to backup your data.

Entourage and Time-Machine-like backup (creates chronological backup of
Identity can be used by both Tiger and Leopard allowing you to roll back to
previous dated backups.

<http://blog.entourage.mvps.org/2008/01/entourage_and_time_machine.html>

Syncing with Apple Address Book is a backup, unless sync ends up deleting
those too.

As soon as you get your contacts entered again, do this. Under File in the
Menu bar, select Export. Contacts to a list (tab delimited file) Now you
have a backup.

 

[Vizar]

Hi,
I've just restored my Contacts in Entourage from Apple Address Book.
All catagories and projects are lost, but that's fix-able.

I'm having problems with linking e-mail and Contacts - I'm heavy used
of that feature and now it's not working correctly. Seems that the
restored contacts are not automatically linked with messages in the
Entourage folders. So I can't click a contact and see all the
correspondence history with the person. There's also no "Last
Correspondence" record, as Entourage doesn't see any e-mails unless
you click "Find Related Items".

Is there a way to tell Entourage to do re-indexing of the folders and
restore the lost links between Contacts and Messages?


-Victor

 

[Vizar]

I'm on MacOS 10.5.4, Entourage 2008 12.1.1

Seems that linking mechanism uses something else than e-mail address,
as when I work with "old" mails (received or sent from/to before I
lost and restored all contacts in Entourage), Entourage still offers
to Add to Address book the sender or recepient, while with the latest
mails that are automatically correctly linked to the Contacts (all
mails I receive and send after restoring my Contacts) it only offers
to Edit Contact (means existing, meas it sees existing contact in this
case)

Thought that might help to figure out the cure

 

[Diane Ross]

I'm having problems with linking e-mail and Contacts - I'm heavy used
of that feature and now it's not working correctly. Seems that the
restored contacts are not automatically linked with messages in the
Entourage folders.

Entourage Preferences --> Address Book select:

Automatically link contacts with the messages I send to them
Automatically link contacts with the messages I receive from them
Automatically match message categories to senders' categories

I'm not sure if selecting that now will go back and re-index. I have no way
to check on this since I have the options selected. Let me know if it does,
so I can document this.

However, this might help you. In the Address Book view, you can select
columns Last Correspondence which is helpful in clearing out old contacts.

 

[Vizar]

I'm not sure if selecting that now will go back and re-index. I have no way

to check on this since I have the options selected. Let me know if it does,
so I can document this.

I've always had these checkboxes selected, but that doesn't help -
address book still doesn't show Last Correspondence date or even any
links with the old messages, even though if I do right click and Find
Related Items on a Contact, it'll bring all the messages found based
on e-mail FROM/TO. Such search results disappear with no new records
to the Last Correspondence field or to the links of a Contact, while
that might be quite logically to expect.. Is it a bug or there's a
difference between Linked (automatically) and Related Items? What
fields does it use for Linking and for defining what is Related?

Just for an experiment, I de-selected above checkboxes and re-launched
Entourage still no changes!

New messages get linked with no problems!
Also, I'm using SpamStieve, but that shouldn't influence this issue I
think.

-Victor

 

[Mike]

I got a request to sync my Entourage addresses with address book and after I accepted, all my contacts vanished. All I have left are the group lists. Yesterday was the first time I synched up my new iphone to Entourage and I have the addresses on my iphone but I'm afraid to sync it up again. What should I do?

 

[Diane Ross]

I got a request to sync my Entourage addresses with address book and after I
accepted, all my contacts vanished. All I have left are the group lists.
Yesterday was the first time I synched up my new iphone to Entourage and I
have the addresses on my iphone but I'm afraid to sync it up again. What
should I do?

Do you have a backup? With all of the sync problems, working without a
backup is dangerous.

See this article for clues, but nothing will help recover data that has been
deleted.

Once you get your primary file created BACK IT UP!