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.

The basic concept is to create a new user account in OS X, a process which will generate new instances of iTunes and Address Book. Then you sync your iPhone (or iPod Touch) to iTunes in your new account, launch Address Book and export the synched data. Finally, you switch back to your primary account and import your data.

This approach has been tested in OS X 10.5.2 (Leopard), with iTunes 7.6 and Address Book 4.1...  though it’s the principle we’re after here and I see no reason why it wouldn’t work on previous versions of OS X or these apps.

There may be underlying reasons why your Address Book lost all of the data... it could be something to do with the iPhone synching process itself (a Google search shows that some people believe this to be the case), or it could be a permissions problem, or it could be an error within Address Book... Who knows, and we won’t get into the why of it at the moment.  That being said, we should probably take this opportunity to do what we can to make sure that our woefully empty Address Book will be a decent place for our restored data to land.  We suggest:

• Use disk utility or another app to verify and repair disk permissions
• Re-install Address Book if you’ve noticed any strange behavior lately
• If things are really bad, do a clean install of OS X and rebuild from there

Anyhow... let’s get on with getting our data out of our iPhone!

First you have to create a user account. (For those of you with multiple accounts, please bear with me... some folks will want to be reminded of how to do this basic step).  Open System Preferences from the Apple Menu and select
System->Accounts to get the following window:

Click on the lock and enter your administrator password to be able to make changes.  Click on the plus sign to create a new account and enter in the required information. When the account is finished being created log out of your current account and then log into the new one.  OS X will now appear pristine and simple.

Before launching anything, go ahead and plug your iPhone in. If iTunes does not automatically launch, go ahead and launch it.

You should see the iTunes Software License Agreement... click ‘Agree’. You will now be taken to the iTunes Setup Assistant. You can go through it if you want to, but since we’re just doing this to get information out of our iPhone we can just click ‘Cancel’ and get on with things.

After dismissing some little message about ringtones we will now see an empty iTunes sitting in front of us. Under ‘Devices’ you should see your iPhone. Select it and then click on the ‘Info’ tab.  Make sure that no checkboxes are selected on this page.

The section at the top should be ‘Contacts’. Check the box that says ‘Sync Address Book contacts’ and leave the radio button ‘All contacts’ selected. Now click on the ‘Apply’ button in the lower right corner of the iTunes window. The following dialogue box will pop up asking you what you want to do with the information on your iPhone:

Click ‘Merge Info’ to allow your contacts to be moved from your iPhone into the new account we’re working with.

After a little activity (depending on your computer and the amount of data you’re moving, this could take a little while)...   a ‘Sync Alert’ window will pop up, telling you how many records want to be added to Address Book:

Click on ‘Sync Contacts’ to allow this to happen.  You can now eject your iPhone and quit iTunes if you wish.

Now launch Address Book to find that your contacts are now there. In Address Book go to the ‘File’ menu and select Export->Address Book Archive and save the archive to {userRoot}/Public/Drop Box (the ‘Drop Box’ folder inside your ‘Public’ folder -- this will allow for easily being able to access it from your primary account).

Next, close Address Book, log out of the current account and log back into your primary account.

Open a Finder window and navigate to /Users/{userRoot_of_new_account}/Public and drag the ‘Drop Box’ folder to your desktop.  You will get a dialogue that looks like:

Click ‘Continue’ to allow this to happen.  You will be prompted for your password... enter it to allow the copying action to take place.

Finally, the home stretch!  Now you can launch your empty Address Book, go to File->Import->Address Book Archive...

...and navigate to the archive you placed on your desktop a moment ago: ~/Desktop/Drop Box/{archive filename}.

All should go well and your contacts should now be happily residing in Address Book again!