Who says Macs don’t crash?

Apparently, it’s a well know fact that Apple Mac’s never crash… In practice, it’s a different story. I’d had my MacBook Pro for two days when it first hung completely, giving me Apple’s version of Microsoft’s Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) – Apple’s version is translucent gray. Luckily, I haven’t seen one of these again.

And though crashes are few and far between -and my laptop does appear to be a lot stabler than my previous XP-based system- today’s crash was particularly nasty.

I’d just finished adding all the contacts I made at the We Media Conference last week, when the Address Book application became unresponsive. Eventually both iChat and Mail became unresponsive as well, so I went to the ActivityMonitor and shut down the non-responsive services (others I simply Force-Quit from the Dock).

After rebooting my laptop, I loaded Address Book and was greeted by an empty rolodex. Just me and Apple’s numbers. My 600+ contacts gone. Poof! Maybe they went into Steve Jobs’ address book… good luck.

And rummaging through my hard drive yielded nothing else. I found a couple of files (AddressBook.data and AddressBook.data.previous) stored under the Library/Application Support/AddressBook folder, but neither appears to hold any useful data. And of course any Address Book backups I did make are really old.

Luckily, I have my addresses backed up on my Dash phone, so if all goes well I won’t have lost that much information. Still, losing contacts is never good…

What about you? Any lost-info horror stories? Macs crashing? Suggestions for recovering my data or backing it up in the future? Leave a comment…

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