The case of the missing contact data.....
After frustration over the years about their earlier spam-your-contacts policies, I finally warmed up to Plaxo earlier this year. They had finally started making a Mac sync product, that worked directly with the built-in Address Book application. I'd been using Address Book for the last several years, so I was excited to be able to take advantage of Plaxo's sync/automatic address book updating/etc. features with my existing contact store.
All was fine for several months. I updated several contacts with more current information after Plaxo discovered they had Plaxo accounts - this is one of their nicer features. A few weeks ago I noticed that scanr had a business card feature, and that it could be connected to Plaxo. Neat! Snap a phone-cam photo (or, in my case, use your digital cam to take the shots) of your business cards, then send the pics to bc@scanr.com. Scanr does the recognition, sends the updates to Plaxo, who actually sync in changes to existing contacts, as well as adding new content for new contacts. Wonderful! The Plaxo<->Mac sync means that, from sending the photo by e-mail, you don't have to do anything to get business cards into your Address Book. Handy, fast, surprisingly accurate.
Well, except when Plaxo becomes a liability. Yesterday I was sending an e-mail when my mail client froze up on contact lookup. Weird. So, I open up Address Book to see what's going on. Huh, it's blank. No contacts. Not the usual 601 contacts, 0. That's odd, I didn't remember deleting all my contacts. I figured I could just go to Plaxo and re-sync back all my contacts... until, to my shock, I find that Plaxo is already empty, too. That's not good.
Longer story short: Plaxo seems to have actually been at fault. When I restore my Address Book backup from a few weeks back, it lives for a few minutes, until the mad-Plaxo-demon takes over and removes all my contacts again. Some kind of friendly sync you've got there, er, I mean, "sink".
When I contacted Plaxo support, they were nice enough to tell me I had a ton of contacts in my "Trash". Which, of course, is only accessible from their Premium account. Huh. You delete my data, then charge me to get it back? Sounds like a bad data-ransom scheme.
Something's very wrong at Plaxo. I hope that they fix this problem, and start treating customers' data like the gold that it is - that which they must preserve, above all else, to satisfy their customers. I'll update this post if they offer me any sort of remedy. In the mean time, if you have Plaxo, I might suggest you turn off "Auto Sync", and make a backup of your data before you hit the manual sync button.
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Comments
Hi-
(I am a Plaxo employee) I'm sorry to read that you lost your Address Book - it sounds like your Address Book data store is probably trashed (not necessarily due to Plaxo for Mac) so even when you restore from your backup it gets trashed when Plaxo goes to sync the data.
I suggest you quit Address Book and Plaxo (from the menu item) then go into your home Application Support folder (path ~/Library/Application Support/ and move the "Address Book" folder found there to the Desktop or elsewhere (Trash comes to mind). Then immediately log out of your Mac and then log back in - a new Address Book database store will be create automatically with a card for you and one for Apple prepopulated in your Address Book.
If you have Plaxo installed and subscribe to our Premium service (which I believe is available now with a 30 day free trial) you can undelete your contacts and have Plaxo for Mac automatically repopulate your Apple Address Book.
If you are not interested in using Plaxo, you might be okay using the Address Book backup file you've been attempting to use (though I'm not sure if it could contain the seed of the corruption or not - if you go this route it would be best to create a vCard export of all your contacts from within Apple Address Book, delete all your contacts (and possibly trash the data store as mentioned before) and then repopulate your Address Book with the vCard export file.
If Plaxo for Mac caused your Address Book corruption, I'm very sorry - but it isn't clear from the sequence of events that you mentioned in your article that Plaxo did anything wrong. If the Address Book database becomes unreadable and Plaxo for Mac is instructed to sync then any unavailable contact is assumed to have been deleted since an unreachable contact appears the same to Plaxo for Mac as a deleted one. Plaxo for Mac dutifully carries out the sync that subsequenctly deletes all of your contacts online. This is one of the reasons why we offer our Address Book recovery option with our Premium Service subscription - because sometimes things go wrong and it's nice to know that you can get your data back with a phone call or email to Plaxo support.
Your accusation of Plaxo perpetrating some kind of scheme to boost our Premium Service memberships by purposely deleting our customers' address books is absurd. Anyone who would operate in such a manner would be an absolute idiot. Our services are offered for the genuine benefit they provide for life's little mishaps (well, as those mishaps apply to your address book) and our motive is only to provide a service that enhances your address book and makes it more valuable to you.
-Drew Colace
Posted by: Drew Colace | December 13, 2006 06:18 PM