Friday, February 13, 2009

Corrupt OS X Address Book

I had a problem updating a contact that made its way into my address book without an email...Anytime I tried to update the contact, it would give an error regarding to the corrupt database.

To fix this (assuming OS X 10.5):

1. Close Address Book, Mail.app, and anything else that may use the address book.  Really, just close everything but Finder.

2. Go to /Users/username/Library/Application Support/ and copy the AddressBook folder somewhere safe

3. ONLY AFTER MAKING THE BACKUP ABOVE, look for any files that are something like ABPerson.skIndexInverted and/or ABSubscribedPerson.skIndexInverted and delete them.  I also deleted a file called AddressBook-v22.abcddb.  The skIndexInverted files are indexes, and they were likely what was corrupt (I found a post via Google that indicated something similar).

4. Reopen the address book and see if the problems are alleviated.

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