I lost the contents of my "abook.mab" I still have those in the "abook.mab.bak". Can anyone advise how to regain the lost contents of my "abook.mab"?
I made a copy of "abook.mab.bak" in another folder, change the file name by deleting the “.bak” and put it back in the “:\PortableApps\ThunderbirdPortable\Data\profile” but it did not solve the problem.
Thanks, Ariel.
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I suppose it is possible that the AB was saved a few times, overwriting the bak file with the empty AB. If that's the case, you may need to restore from backup. (You do have a backup, right?)
It's probably obvious, but ... did you rename the .bak file while TB was running? If so, that might explain why it didn't see the restored file. But you probably knew enough not to do that.
Make sure the portable version is running, rather than the regular one. Check that files being updated are where you think they should be (start the program, make a change, close it, and check in that directory for updated file date/time). Try adding an AB entry, save, exit, then go and see if the date/time of the file was updated. If not, then you're not looking where TBP is looking.
If there was no file there at all when you put the backup in place, remove the backup file, then go into TBP and make an AB entry. If it "sticks" when you close and open again, and TBP has created a new file, copy the bak onto the new file after closing TBP, see if it recognizes it then.
There are probably other ways to troubleshoot this. Those might work, and aren't too difficult to do.
MC
Hi,thanks for the reply.
As I said, I did have the .bak file, but could not restore the orginal from it.
As far as I recalled I had closed TB before renaming the .bak file. Since you doubted, I repeated the attempt to ensure that I did it properly. The result is the same. As soon as I opened TB again, I got the window pop up saying; "Corrupt Address Book File: One of your address book files (abook.mab file) could not be read. A new abook.mab file will be created and a back up of the old file; called abook.mab-1.bak will be created in the same directory."
do you have an even older file? It seems that the one you tried already was also borked.
Don't be an uberPr∅. They are stinky.