How use Time Machine with Contacts

I would like to see a phone number deleted a month ago.

I open contacts and do TM. I choose old dates but a contact window comes up blank white and says no cards. No matter what previous date, they all say no cards. Pity does not work intuitively.

Did you restore the contacts file to your boot or another drive or did you try to open it in place on the Time Machine drive?

The intuitive part that joemikeb is referencing above is that once you select a date in Time Machine, and the the new Contact window appears for that date, you need to choose "Restore" to bring the info from the past into the present.

It occurs to me that you might want to use Time Machine to restore the Contact data file (back up the current one first). However, I am not sure what or where this data file might be. It might be in the Contacts package, in which case restoring a past date of the application should do the trick, but I can't say for sure.

Contacts are unique to each user so they could not be embedded in the Contacts app. You will find the Contacts (nee. AddressBook) data in ~/Library/ Application Support/AddressBook where ~/ indicates the user folder.

Sorry guys, did not understand much there, maybe a hair... but

I don't want to restore all my contact back to 6 months ago as I would lose all the new people. I just want to peek into contact 6 months ago and see the phone number of one person who was deleted.

You could restore back 6 months, get the number you want, and then restore back to latest backup...maybe your only option.

I would prefer not doing that as Murphy laws will win and I'll get stuck with old contacts. Any other ideas?

I do think though TM says keep old.. but seem more hairy with Contact my guess.

Back up your current contacts using Contacts > File > Export > Contacts Archive, and then do what I suggested, and you'll have your current contacts ready to import if the forward restore goes bad.

Actually, you can just overwrite the Time Machine restoration by importing your Contacts Archive...no need to do a forward restore.