The iPhone is great and so is Address Book, yet as we all know data loves chaos and there are times when things don’t work as expected...  Namely, what happens if you've been forgetting to make backups of your Address Book and you one day discover that, for whatever reason, your Address Book suddenly goes empty yet you still have all your contacts in your iPhone?  Basically, what if you want to use your iPhone’s data as your backup?

There’s no clear way in iTunes to make sure that your iPhone will over write your Address Book to restore it...  in fact, you may well find (as we did one time) that the iTunes sync procedure will overwrite all the good data on your iPhone, leaving you empty handed on both fronts!  Indeed this very thing happened to us while on an Apple tech support call, and it was little consolation that the support rep felt very sorry about what had happened.

This article discusses a way to get around this problem...  it’s a bit of a work-around, but unlike other solutions which require messing around in Terminal (a moving target for various reasons), we’ve encountered great success with the following approach.