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

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: http://www.outlook-tips.net/
Outlook & Exchange Solutions Center: http://www.slipstick.com

Outlook Tips by email:


EMO - a weekly newsletter about Outlook and Exchange:


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

"Daryl Rose" Daryl wrote in message
...
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

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

"Diane Poremsky [MVP]" wrote:

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: http://www.outlook-tips.net/
Outlook & Exchange Solutions Center: http://www.slipstick.com

Outlook Tips by email:


EMO - a weekly newsletter about Outlook and Exchange:


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

"Daryl Rose" Daryl wrote in message
...
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

"Daryl Rose" Daryl wrote in message
...

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 FIleOpenOutlook Data File. Your
contacts will be in that PSTs Contacts folder.
--
Brian Tillman [MVP-Outlook]

"Daryl Rose" wrote in message
...

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 FileOpenOutlook 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 Tillman [MVP-Outlook]

"Brian Tillman [MVP - Outlook]" wrote:
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 FIleOpenOutlook 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

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

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]
"Daryl Rose" wrote in message
...
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

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 Valentine
[MVP-Outlook]
"Daryl Rose" wrote in message
...
"Brian Tillman [MVP - Outlook]" wrote:
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 FIleOpenOutlook 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

"Russ Valentine [MVP-Outlook]" wrote:

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 FIleOpenOutlook 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 FIleOpenOutlook 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 FIleOpenOutlook 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