Recently, like many others, I have noticed that contact information (and sometimes whole entries) have been disappearing from my OSX Address Book application after I have made changes and synched my information using iSync. It became especially notable when using the beta of Adium in that it was no longer grouping by names based on IM information found in my address book.
I used to use a third party application, as until recently, the Nokia E61 was not a supported phone. As of the last couple of months, I am completely native and have been syncing with multiple computers. Syncing with more than one computer, in my case, my workstation and laptop, is likely what caused my problems. Here is my sure fire way to fix your address book and advice to keep it from happening again.
Do note that if you use groups or custom entries, they will not survive syncs to different computers. Groups are stored in the notes area of a vcard and do not escape to the group area of the Address Book application when synced.
First, make a backup of your address book. This seems like a good idea in any case to be able to revert to a backup in case of things going horribly wrong.
Second, export a vcard of your entire address book like so:
Then go ahead and sync again with your phone. When finished, double click the whole-address book vcard you made in the previous step pictured above, merge the clobbered information and then sync with your phone again. You should then be where you want to be at this point.
In the future, I will only be syncing my phone with one computer and then just copying the contents of my ~/Library/Application Support/Address Book on that computer to the other computers where I want a back up or reference copy.
This should solve your iSync problems.
Technorati Tags: contact management, osx, isync
