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Power failure = lost address book

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1techman
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Power failure = lost address book

Hi,
I'm using Thunderbird Portable edition from a thumb drive so that I can take it with me when I travel. Both of my O.S.'s are Windows XP Pro.
The other night I was working during a storm when the power went off. Results: lost one of my address books.
I keep my contacts in different address books like Friends, Family, Clients etc. The one I was working in was Clients and now I'm in big trouble.

I have gone through the Forums on MozillaZine and found 2 similar threads that address corrupted .mab files and followed the instructions to remove the corruption from the mab.bak file. All attempts have failed. I also compared my mab.bak file to one of my other map files that is working correctly and the only thing I see as corruption is a large gap (space) about 3/4ths the way down.

Another interesting thing is that the client I was working on at the time shows up in the last few lines of the mab.bak file.

I have tried removing the large gap and the last few lines mentioned above to no avail.

I still have the original mab.bak file and it's contents are undisturbed.

At this point I'm at a loss and any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you in advance.

wk
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Last seen: 1 year 5 months ago
Joined: 2007-09-05 12:31
why don´t you copy the undisturbed .mab into your profile?

or did I miss something, did youcheck this article?
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Moving_address_books_between_profiles

"Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisici elit, sed eiusmod tempor incidunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis .." Friday Next -
"May The Schwartz be with You!" Yogurt the Yoda

1techman
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Last seen: 16 years 6 months ago
Joined: 2008-05-26 08:31
That was the first thing I did

After the power failure, the next time I started Thunderbird, while it was loading it came up with the massage that a file (impab.mab) was corrupt and would be replaced & the old file would be saved as impab.mab.bak.

I made another sub folder in the data folder and moved the impab.mab & impab.mab.bak to the new folder. Then I copied the impab.mab.bak back to the data folder and removed the .bak extension and restarted Thunderbird. Same thing happened.

I didn't know about this site so I started reading the forums on mozillaZine with similar problems. The forums there pertain to Thunderbird, not Thunderbird Portable but the information I found there led me to the files that I should look at and some of the possible cures. I tried them all with no luck.

Yesterday I posted a new thread there asking for help, and the response sent me to your site. Now I'm posing the same question here.

What do I need to do to the .bak file which contains all of my business contacts to recover that data?

My other address books for Family, Friends, etc. are still fine.

Thank you

wk
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Last seen: 1 year 5 months ago
Joined: 2007-09-05 12:31
one suggestion

open thunderbird, create a new adressbook,fill in one or two adresses.Close TB.
Its useless to use a bak composed after crash.So you need an old backup. Rename the file to the .map of your new adressbook and copy it over. Open TB, rename the adressbook to your needs.It is essential that you have an untouched backup file, else it won´t work.

"Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisici elit, sed eiusmod tempor incidunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis .." Friday Next -
"May The Schwartz be with You!" Yogurt the Yoda

consul
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Last seen: 1 year 1 month ago
Joined: 2007-05-02 13:47
did the import function work?

Something similar happened to me a while back, and copying over an older version of the mab didn't work, but I was able to import the address, and then I moved them over to the right spots.

As for the mozilla folks sending you over here, I don't think anything portableapps did to the files would have mattered, those files are nested pretty deep in the program.
Though it probably was a good suggestion, as we would be the ones w/ usb power failure problems. Smile

Don't be an uberPr∅. They are stinky.

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