Repair a Smart Group-related Address Book problem
May 04, '09 07:30:03AM
Contributed by: cibi3d
Today I decided to make a strange Smart Group in Address Book which resulted in an infinite loop and a crash of the application. The Smart Group's conditions were: Card -- is not -- member of AGROUP and Card -- is member of -- any group.
Of course, when I later decided to open Address Book again, it tried to fulfill the Smart Group and crashed again. I managed to solve the problem with the following steps:
- Obviously I had Address Book closed, but just to be explicit, close it if it's somehow running.
- Delete the file ~/Library » Application Support » AddressBook » AddressBook-v22.abcddb. Make a backup first, just in case.
- Delete the smart group metadata file in ~/Library » Application Support » AddressBook » Metadata. To find the right file to delete, so I wouldn't lose all my Smart Groups, I sorted the files by date and erased the last-edited file that ended in "...ABGroup.abcdg".
- Relaunch Address Book. It will create the AddressBook-v22 file automatically, using the information in the Metadata directory.
I didn't lose any contacts or related information, and Address Book is now working as expected.
[robg adds: I can confirm that you can, indeed, kill Address Book with this Smart Group, and that the fix described here works.]
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