MacOS – trying to restore contacts in yosemite with time machine

contactsmacosrestoretime-machine

ok — so my wife lost her contacts on her macbook pro (and icloud as well), but we use time machine — i was trying to look around for help in how to restore ALL her contacts using time machine — is there a file somewhere that contains all the contacts on the system that by replacing it with a full batch of contacts would replace the empty one i have how???

thanks

keith

Best Answer

To add to what @n1000 said above, some more details:

  • connect your time machine backup drive
  • you may need to login as root to get access to that Library folder
  • choose Finder->Go To folder-> <path-to-library>, where <path-to-libary> is something like "/Volumes/MyTimeMachineDrive/.../Users/keith/Library"
  • in there you can then browse to Application Support->AddressBook (I forget the details of where exactly it is)
  • copy the AddressBook back to your MBP and change ownership on it (if you are root) so that it can be read/written to by "keith"
  • re-login as "keith" and move the AddressBook to same location on your MBP "/Users/keith/Library/Application Support" (I think)
  • you will be asked to overwrite - go ahead if you want to turf the old AddressBook
  • open your contacts and voila! all should be well after that...

Please note that I had to do the the above because I had to restore contacts from a time machine backup drive of an old MBP to a new one (and the old MBP was dead, so I could not simply export contacts from it...).

Related Question