Lost all email address in contacts

[Daryl Rose]

I lost all of my email address in my contacts. I deleted a address book, and
that wiped out all of my email address. How do I recover those?

I make weekly backups, so I should be able to restore from backup, but I
don't know where the address book is kept, so I don't know which files I need
to restore.

I have Vista and Office 2007

Thank you.

Daryl

 

[Diane Poremsky [MVP]]

Where did you delete it from? The address book is a virtual view of your
contacts folder. If you deleted it from a list in the actual address book
(what you see when you click To) then you only need to re-enable it - right
click on the contacts folder and choose properties then outlook address
book.


--
Diane Poremsky [MVP - Outlook]



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mailto:[email protected]

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[Daryl Rose]

Hi Diane,

Menu bar -> Tools -> Address Book.

After looking through what I did, I realize that I did delete the address
book, but rather the names within the address book. I was having some other
issues, and I thought that if would clean out those contacts, they would get
repopulated from the actual contacts. I didn't realize that deleting the
contacts from that list would wipe out the email address from the contacts.

I don't see any way to "re-enable" anything. Can I recover the actual
contacts without recovering the entire Outlook.pst?

Thanks.

Daryl

Where did you delete it from? The address book is a virtual view of your
contacts folder. If you deleted it from a list in the actual address book
(what you see when you click To) then you only need to re-enable it - right
click on the contacts folder and choose properties then outlook address
book.


--
Diane Poremsky [MVP - Outlook]



Outlook Tips by email:
mailto:[email protected]

EMO - a weekly newsletter about Outlook and Exchange:
mailto:[email protected]

Let's Really Fix Outlook 2010
http://forums.slipstick.com/forumdisplay.php?f=34

I lost all of my email address in my contacts. I deleted a address book,
and
that wiped out all of my email address. How do I recover those?

I make weekly backups, so I should be able to restore from backup, but I
don't know where the address book is kept, so I don't know which files I
need
to restore.

I have Vista and Office 2007

Thank you.

Daryl

 

[Brian Tillman [MVP - Outlook]]

I lost all of my email address in my contacts. I deleted a address book, and
that wiped out all of my email address. How do I recover those?

Ourlook doesn't use an address book. The feature titled "Address Book" is a
view of your Contacts folder(s). Are you saying your Contacts folder is
empty?

I make weekly backups, so I should be able to restore from backup, but I
don't know where the address book is kept, so I don't know which files I
need
to restore.

How do you make those backups? If you copy your PST (the correct way to make
a backup), then open the most recent with FIle>Open>Outlook Data File. Your
contacts will be in that PSTs Contacts folder.

 

[Brian Tillman [MVP - Outlook]]

I didn't realize that deleting the
contacts from that list would wipe out the email address from the contacts.

One of the reasons you should never try to manipulate your Contacts via the
Address Book interface.

I don't see any way to "re-enable" anything. Can I recover the actual
contacts without recovering the entire Outlook.pst?

Open your most recent PST backup with File>Open>Outlook Data File. Open the
Contacts folder that PST contains, select all the Contacts in it, and copy
them to the main Contacts folder. You'll need to handle duplicates somehow.
One fairly easy way is to delete the contents of the main Contacts folder
before copying the enteries in the backup Contacts folder. If there are
entries in the main Contacts folder that aren't in the backup because you
added them after the backup, then copy those to the backup Contacts folder
first so you have a complete set. You can re-add those mail addresses
manually, as there shouldn't be many that need fixing.

 

[Daryl Rose]

Ourlook doesn't use an address book. The feature titled "Address Book" is a
view of your Contacts folder(s). Are you saying your Contacts folder is
empty?

No, the contacts were not deleted, only the email addresses withing the
contacts.

How do you make those backups? If you copy your PST (the correct way to make
a backup), then open the most recent with FIle>Open>Outlook Data File. Your
contacts will be in that PSTs Contacts folder.

I use Vista, so I use the built in backup & restore program within Vista.
The last backup I made was over a week ago, and I don't want to restore the
outlook.pst file, because I've made several calendar updates, emails, etc...
since then.

I'll try to explain in a little more detail what happened.

When creating emails and entering addresses on the To line, I was getting a
lot of old email address popping up. (Contacts had changed email address,
but the old one would pop up, not the newest one.) I figured those were
cached somewhere and needed to be cleaned out. In my research, I seen a lot
of contacts in the "Address Book", and several of them where the old address.
I figured this is where those address where being cached and decided to
clean them out so they would be gone forever. I didn't realize that by
deleting them I would also delete the email address from the actual contacts.
I assumed that this was just a "view" of the actual contacts, not actually
tied to the contacts.

When I open the Outlook data file as you suggest I only see Archive.pst &
Outlook.pst, nothing labeled Contacts. If I try to open Outlook.pst I get an
error (I assume because I already have Outlook open).

If I could just recover the Contacts only, I think that I would be fine.
Any other suggestions?

Thanks.

Daryl

 

[Daryl Rose]

Well, I figured out a work around. I remembered that I have some of my
contacts on my laptop. Severally out of date, but most are there. I dumped
them to an SD card and moved them over to the desktop. Outlook updated what
needed to be updated, so I have most of my contacts back the way they should
be. However, I'm still not happy with the way this occured with no way to
recover just the contacts. This doesn't make me very happy with the way
Outlook handles contacts.

Thanks for all of the help.

Daryl Rose

 

[Russ Valentine [MVP-Outlook]]

This was 100% end user error, not Outlook error.
There is always a simple way to restore Contacts you inadvertently delete:
Restore from backup. If you do not backup data, you'll get to do this all
over some day.

 

[Russ Valentine [MVP-Outlook]]

If you had a valid backup of your Outlook data file, you could simply open
it and retrieve your Contacts form the Contacts Folder--precisely the way
Brian told you. What you have instead only you could know. You created your
backup.

 

[Daryl Rose]

If you had a valid backup of your Outlook data file, you could simply open
it and retrieve your Contacts form the Contacts Folder--precisely the way
Brian told you. What you have instead only you could know. You created your
backup.
--

Russ,

Thank you for both of your replys, but if you had read my enitre post you
would have read that I did have a valid backup. I perform weekly backups of
my data. The only way that I see that I can recover is to recover the
entire outlook.pst file, and that would over write much of the changes that
I've done over the week. What Brain suggest did not work.

I just went back and re-read what Brian wrote. Perhaps you can clearify for
me the steps that he told me.

Brian wrote:
If you copy your PST (the correct way to make
a backup), then open the most recent with FIle>Open>Outlook Data File. Your
contacts will be in that PSTs Contacts folder.

1. What is the correct why to make the backup?
I let vista backup & restore backup the .pst file, is that not the correct
way to backup the data?
2. When I FIle>Open>Outlook Data File I receive an error telling me that
outlook.pst can't be opened. Well that makes sence since I already have it
open in order to do the FIle>Open>Outlook Data

Now, what part of this am I getting wrong?

And as for being 100% user error, I disagree with that. If the Contacts is
where I store all of the contact information, then why does Outlook use the
"Address Book"? And don't tell me that it doesn't, because I see the names
and email addresses listed in the address book. As soon as I was able to
recover my email address the entire address book was populated again. And
when I click on the "To", or "CC" or "BCC", guess what comes up? Not my
contacts, but the address book. So it clearly uses an address book.

So once again thank you for your helpful replys Russ. Your help is alway's
apprecated.

Daryl

 

[Daryl Rose]

Open your most recent PST backup with File>Open>Outlook Data File. Open the
Contacts folder that PST contains, select all the Contacts in it, and copy
them to the main Contacts folder. You'll need to handle duplicates somehow.
One fairly easy way is to delete the contents of the main Contacts folder
before copying the enteries in the backup Contacts folder. If there are
entries in the main Contacts folder that aren't in the backup because you
added them after the backup, then copy those to the backup Contacts folder
first so you have a complete set. You can re-add those mail addresses
manually, as there shouldn't be many that need fixing.

Brian,

I owe you an apology. I didn’t see this reply, I only seen the next one
down where you ask how I made my backups. If I had seen this posting, then I
would have understood what you meant about "Coping" the contacts. Russ got
under my skin a bit with his condescending attitude, and when I went back to
re-read your reply, I only read what I thought was the only one that you talk
about restoring the contacts. Sorry about that, this one must had slipped
in and I didn't even notice.

Thanks for your help.

Daryl

 

[Russ Valentine [MVP-Outlook]]

Repeating: any valid backup file can simply be opened, allowing you to
retrieve only the information you need to restore, not the entire file. You
backup your data file by simply making a copy of it. I have no idea what
"vista backup and restore" is or does, but I would never use it in lieu of
creating valid backups of data files.
It is quite well documented that the address book view is simply a view of
electronic addresses in the Contacts Folder and should never be used for
editing or manipulating Contact data.