I wanted to transfer my Address Book to the laptop for traveling, so I copied the appropriate folder – or so I thought – to a CD-R and transfered it to the laptop. (Pic links to a screenshot of the folder in question.)
Unfortunately, the Address Book app won’t import it because it doesn’t recognize it as vCard or LDIF format. (Note: I know nothing about these formats.)
Any idea what, if anything, I did wrong?
You need to copy that folder back into your Application Support directory which is where Address Book looks for it. Copy the whole folder into:
/Users/yourusername/Application Support/
It’ll ask you if you want to replace what’s already in there. Assuming you don’t have anything in Address Book on your laptop that wasn’t on the desktop (or wherever you copied it from), go ahead and overwrite it. Open Address Book back up, and you should see all your entries from the CD-R.
If for some reason you do have stuff already in Address Book that’s not in the folder on the CD-R, make sure you export that as vCards first so that you can reimport it after you overwrite the old data folder with the new one.
I hope this makes sense.
Thank you very kindly, mduser63! It worked.
Only thing was, the path turned out to be:
/myusername/Library/Application Support.
(I’m running OSX 10.3.9, FWTW.)
Oops, I left Library out inadvertently. Glad you got it working.
You’ve already solved the problem, but let me add one more thing. If you subscribe to Apple’s hideously expensive .Mac service, there’s a little-known feature of it that lets you sync your address book to the net, and therefore access it from any Mac. I wouldn’t buy .Mac for that, but if you’ve already got it…
Look for .Mac synchronization service on the .Mac web site.
Command-F is your Friend.
You can also export all of your contacts as a single vCard by selecting all of the contacts, then choosing Export from the File menu. Then, import the file into the computer you are moving to.
