Exporting and importing Personal Address Book
I imported some (a lot!) of contact information into my Personal Address Book. I got two exact duplicates for a lot of contacts, which was very annoying.
I thought I would create a corrected version of my Personal Address Book by editing the .csv file. As an experiment I exported my Personal Address Book, and then deleted abook.sqlite, and then imported exactly the same .csv file that had I exported. I lost all of my named lists of respondents, of which I have several dozen.
Fortunately I had saved my original abook.sqlite. I copied it back into the proper place. My named lists of email respondents magically re-appeared. Along with all the duplicated contacts.
How can I import new contacts into my Personal Address Book without duplication and also without losing my named lists? How can I eliminate duplicates from my existing Personal Address Book?
Thanks in advance for any insights into what is going on. I am feeling pretty clueless!
Modified by charliep2
All Replies (5)
How can I import new contacts into my Personal Address Book without duplication
When importing contacts into an existing address book, you'll get duplicates when those contacts already exist.
and also without losing my named lists?
Export in LDIF format first instead of CSV. Upon importing mailing lists should be restored.
In any case, make sure you do have a full backup of your Thunderbird profile before messing with address books. https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profiles-where-thunderbird-stores-user-data#w_backing-up-a-profile
Thanks for the suggestion! I'm working on it. I can edit .csv files much much more easily than .ldif files. So I am trying out some LDIF <--> CSV converters that I have found, and getting unwelcome error messages. It's a bit vexing since I am hardly at all familiar with LDAP and .ldif. I do see that the output .ldif file properly contains my mailing list.
My first goal is to do this: Thunderbird -> .ldif -> .csv -> .ldif -> Thunderbird (with zero editing). If I can do that without screwing up my Personal Address Book, I will feel immensely better about using .ldif. I admit to being surprised if no one has solved this problem before.
My first goal is to do this: Thunderbird -> .ldif -> .csv -> .ldif -> Thunderbird
I have no idea what you're trying to achieve. Simply export as LDIF and then import as LDIF, if that is what you're trying to do. There is no need to mess with the LDIF file.
Hello christ1,
Of course it's not my final goal to simply be able to import and export the same .ldif. I need to have the information in .csv format so I can edit it. I can't easily edit .ldif whereas I can use vim on .csv and have some very positive effects.
But I am afraid to try that, if I can't even do the suggested idempotent process without screwing up something.
Naturally Yours, Charlie P.
charliep2 said
I need to have the information in .csv format so I can edit it. I can't easily edit .ldif whereas I can use vim on .csv and have some very positive effects.
By it's nature CSV will never contain mailing list data. So the process of conversion to CSV will inherently destroy your lists.
Importing your modified CSV will not affect existing lists, but your edits will not modify the list entries because they will still point to the original CADDAV data in the address book, not you modified data. This will also see two of everything imported.
Seriously I suggest you rethink what it is you are doing as it simply can not work as you envisage.