How can I recover my accidentaly deleted address book?
I was working in my address book this morning and selected a contact that I wanted to delete. When I pressed the delete button, all of a sudden my entire address book dissapeared. I'm fairly sure I only selected the specific contact, but apparently somehow my entire address book got deleted with it.
I can still see the two default address books of thunderbird on the left side, but they always have been and still are empty. The third address book (the one that I've been using the past years), is completely gone.
I have tried to recover the address book in multiple ways: - looked in the recycle bin of my computer and of thunderbird, but there was nothing to be found in both of them - I used the 'undo' button about 4 to 5 times, but nothing happened unfortunately. Ctrl+z didn't give any response as well - I waited with closing thunderbird, untiI I looked up my Thunderbird profile in user/appdata/roaming/thunderbird/profiles/****.defaul. I copied the abook.mab file to another directory, closed thunderbird and restarted it. Unfortunately this didn't help either. - I've also tried to recover any deleted files on my entire computer using Recuva software. I haven't been able to find anything related to the address book thought.
Is there any way to retrieve/recover my thunderbird address book? I haven't been able to find a good solution online as of yet. But I figure it can't just be completely gone after I've clicked teh delete button by accident, right?
I'm using thunderbird 24.4.0 on Windows 8.1. Currently I am not using a tool to synchronise the address book to my google account, because I'm working with the maillinglist and I haven't found a way to synchronise them fully. So there's no recent backup of the address book unfortunately.
I really hope you can help me with this. Thanks in advance!
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In addition to all of the above: I followed some advice from some forum threads about recovering lost contacts from Thunderbird address book and opened the abook.mab file in a text editor. There I could see that all the addresses are still present in that file somehow.
I have tried to recover them by editing the file, but I didn't succeed yet. Doing it 1 by 1 is nearly impossible, since there ar 650 contact cards in the address book.
I did safe all the original files just after it happened and keep those in another location just in case we may be able to use those to recover the files.
First, install MoreFunctionsForAddressBook (site is down at time of writing), as it has some options to recover deleted contacts. Rename the abook.mab that apparently contains the contacts to something like abookOLD.mab and see if you can import it to Address Book (Tools/MoreFunctionsForAddressBook/Actions for addressbooks/Import addressbook from mab file.
Also try right-clicking an address book, MoreFunctionsForAddressBook/Recover/Restore.
Thanks a lot for your fast reply!
I've tried both options you gave, but unfortunately didn't manage to restore/retrieve any data from the file. The MoreFunctionsForAddressBook add on is very user friendly however and easy to work with.
I also found a few threads that explain that it is possibe to open the original abook.mab file in a text editor and delete some entries in it, to 'turn back' the command that said to delete the addressbook in the first place.
This is the one I've found and tried to follow: http://www.pirules.org/blog/?page_id=312 and
I've played around with it a bit, and managed to retrieve the specific address I was meaning to delete at the time the whole addressbook got accidentaly deleted. I didn't manage to retrieve the full addressbook though, mostly because I have a hard time understanding the code language that is used in the file....
Could this be an option for me? And if so, how do I determine which entry to delete from the file and which one to leave alone?
I'm afraid I don't have any specific advice beyond that offered in the post you cited. But another thing to try is to export an address book to an LDIF file (Tools/Export...) and view it in a text editor; that format may be easier to edit than the mab file.
There is also an add-on, by the same author of MFFAB, that scans a folder for email addresses, in case that's the only way you can recover them.