What's your TB version? If it's 60 or lower, there is an add-on that can recover deleted contacts.

Thunderbird version is 68.1.2, so that will probably not work although I will check the add-ons just in case.

If you open abook.mab (Personal Address Book), from the profile folder, in a text editor, and search for the deleted contact, you might be able to recover the data. I believe deleted contacts are still in the file, but marked as deleted, much as deleted messages are marked as deleted in a mail folder file.

Check also Collected Addresses, which contains addresses of contacts you've sent mail to.

Nothing is working to restore my address book

How can I restore my address book?

I need help! I will pay for the help!

sfhowes said

If you open abook.mab (Personal Address Book), from the profile folder, in a text editor, and search for the deleted contact, you might be able to recover the data. I believe deleted contacts are still in the file, but marked as deleted, much as deleted messages are marked as deleted in a mail folder file. Check also Collected Addresses, which contains addresses of contacts you've sent mail to.

Where is the abook.mab?

You can restore an address book from a saved version or from a profile backup. Help/Troubleshooting, click Open Folder to open the profile folder which contains abook.mab; close TB before making any changes or copying in abook.mab from a profile backup.

There was nothing in the file....I sure wish I could find it in trash or something. There's 2,500 names at least. I've started over but lost all addresses and phone numbers. Can only retrieve name and email. So in the future how to I back it up?

Copy abook.mab (Personal Address Book) and history.mab (Collected Addresses) to a backup location, or export address books from Tools/Export... Save as type: LDIF.

If you have contacts stored in webmail accounts, they can probably be exported from there and imported to TB. Search your computer or backups for abook.mab (include hidden folders).

You can restore an address book from a saved version or from a profile backup. Help/Troubleshooting, click Open Folder to open the profile folder which contains abook.mab; close TB before making any changes or copying in abook.mab from a profile backup.

Somehow my Personal Address Book in TB became duplicated (so entries were showing up twice in All Address Books) and when I deleted all the entries in one PAB copy they all disappeared from the other copy as well. I found the abook.mab file from your instructions but I don't know how to restore the data to the PAB. When I used the Import wizard the results were way too many records and no details in any of them. How do I import the data into TB from the .mab text file?

An abook.mab file from a backup can't be imported while TB is open. Close TB and copy abook.mab from the backup into the profile folder, overwriting the current abook.mab. When TB is restarted, Personal Address Book should show the contacts in the backup abook.mab.