address book disappeared

[Miles]

In TB9.0.1 there are several address books. I was in one book and an
address was highlighted and I hit the delete key and the entire book
is gone! Edit/Undo is greyed out so I can't find a way to restore it.
Don't want to close TB or do anything else until this book is
recovered. And I'm moving tomorrow so little time to get this corrected.
Miles

[WLS]

Restore your backed up profile.

--
Thunderbird Beta | openSUSE 11.4 Linux
Get openSUSE: http://software.opensuse.org/121/en

[Miles]

* WLS wrote, On 02-Feb-12 10:04:

> On 02/02/2012 12:44 PM, Miles wrote:
>> In TB9.0.1 there are several address books. I was in one book and an
>> address was highlighted and I hit the delete key and the entire book is
>> gone! Edit/Undo is greyed out so I can't find a way to restore it.
>> Don't want to close TB or do anything else until this book is
>> recovered. And I'm moving tomorrow so little time to get this corrected.
>> Miles
>>
>
> Restore your backed up profile.
>

Hopefully I could restore the one AB only if I knew which file it is
because there's been many changes to the profile since the last backup
about a month ago.

[WLS]

Well, lucky for you I spent some time last week creating a new address
book, maybe.

Looking in my profile I see abook.mab and abook-1.mab files. After
quitting Thunderbird, I renamed abook-1.mab to abook-1bak.mab, and
restarted Thunderbird. The Address book was still listed, but empty.

I quit Thunderbird.

Looking in my profile it appears abook-1.mab was recreated, so I deleted
it, and reset the original abook-1.mab, and restated Thunderbird. All my
addresses in my new address book were back.

Doing the same with abook.mab, all of the addresses in my Personal
Address Book are missing.

Hope that leads you in the proper direction.

Once fixed, do a backup.

[goodwin]

The direction you are pointing Miles is the wrong one. abook-1 is not a
normal abook file but one created by you on your own and must be handled
differently than the abook.mab.

Best to see http://kb.mozillazine.org/Moving_address_books_between_profiles

[WLS]

I'm so sorry. I thought he mentioned he had several.

I have Personal Address Book (abook.mab) Collected Addresses (no idea
where they are stored, and the one I created (abook-1.mab).

So, just for kicks I created test1 (abook-2.mab), test2 (abook-3.mab),
and so on, until the last book was named I have no clue (abook-10.mab).

That gave me several. Deleting them also deletes the associated .mab
file. So if he has the one he lost saved in his backup profile, he could
try copying it, and pasting it in the current profile.

From the link you supplied.

"Recovering address books from a damaged profile

In the unfortunate event that your profile is damaged, it is possible to
recover your address books, even if the profile itself is unusable. Of
course you have made regular backups which you can simply import, but
just in case you hadn't... read on.

First, copy the damaged profile, or at least the ".mab" files, to a safe
place. Next, you will have to make a new profile, configure your
accounts and preferences, etc. Start Thunderbird and go to the address
book. Create some new address books ("File -> New -> Address Book").
Create as many address books as you had in the damaged profile, and give
them names like "AB1", "AB2", ...

Now exit Thunderbird, and go to the new profile folder. You will see
files with names like "abook-1.mab", "abook-2.mab", with small file
sizes, because they are empty. Copy the saved ".mab" files from the old,
damaged profile into the new profile. For each ".mab" file from the old
profile, there should be a file with the same name in the new profile.
If there isn't, rename the old file, giving it the name of a new file
which is not used yet.

Start Thunderbird again, and go to the address book. If all is well, the
newly created address books are filled with the contents of the old
ones. You can now change the names "AB1", "AB2", ... into something more
meaningful by right-clicking on each address book and choosing "Properties".

Of course, if your old address books have been damaged, this procedure
will not help.
"

Again, I apologize for my incorrect information. At least I taught
myself something new, that I didn't know before.

[Ron K.]

WLS on 2/2/2012 8:50 PM, keyboarded a reply:

Collected Addresses are stored in history.mab which is a bit obscure as
names go.

--
Ron K.
Who is General Failure, and why is he searching my HDD?
Kernel Restore reported Major Error used BSOD to msg the enemy!

[Miles]

* Ron K. wrote, On 03-Feb-12 11:02:

Thanks, Ron, however collected addresses is not the one I'm interested
in -- I only use that for "collected addresses" to which I may receive
a few business msgs.