Manually Backup Your Address Book Contacts
There may come a day when you want to manually backup your contacts on the Mac OS. Reasons may vary, but once you have this database file and you want to put your contacts back into address book, it is super easy as all that needs to be done is a simple double-click on the file that gets created at the end of this tutorial. To start, open up your address book, and if you don’t know which icon it is on your dock, it should like something like this:
Once open navigate to the File menu at the top of the screen and hover your mouse over export. A sub menu should pop out to the side.
Select “Address Book Archive…” by single clicking on it. A drop down box should appear over your Address Book application:
Create a name for the output file, or the backup file containing all of your contacts. By default Address Book will use the name of itself, and the date in which you are creating it which I think is a good idea if you plan on creating more backups in the future or you keep a lot of contacts and are constantly updating the contacts database. Select a destination to save this file, such as the desktop or the documents folder by clicking the drop down box. After you click “Save” a file will be saved to the location you specified.
If you ever need to revert back to one of these archives, all you have to do, as stated above, is double-click on it. Address Book will automatically open and if any duplicates are found in your current contacts database, Address Book will ask to overwrite them. You can simply say “Replace All” and the job is done.
