I both mirror my drive with SuperDuper! and I backup some miscellaneous stuff using Apple’s Backup. One of the miscellaneous things I backup with Backup is my address book. I also sync my address book with .mac such that my PowerBook, my iMac and my mini for work all have the things I need right when I need them. However, .mac syncing isn’t perfect. This morning the sync’r asked me if it was OK to delete all my address book entries. Of course, I didn’t realize what it was asking until after I clicked OK. Next thing I knew all my iChat users switched from friendly names, to their cryptic AIM usernames. Hand hits forehead At this point I cried. Then I started thinking about the easiest way to restore. Knowing others issues with Backup, I was nervous, but realized it was my best bet. If it worked, it would take less than one minute, and it certainly couldn’t make things worse.

• Open up Backup
• double click on the “Personal Data & Settings”
• go to the restore tab
• select the latest entry
• select “Address Book”
• click restore
• watch it go.

Less than a minute later my Address Book was restored and my faith in Backup has increased. This was the first time I actually needed it, and it worked. Now, restoring my address book isn’t rocket science, so we’ll see how it fairs when/if I need it to pull a little more weight. Hopefully that won’t be necessary.

Lessons:

• read those sync dialogs
• Apple’s Backup isn’t 100% useless. In fact, for this purpose it was probably the best solution.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 14th, 2006 at 6:53 am and is filed under Apple, Personal, OS X. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.