I have a rather large AddressBook on my various Mac computers, it weighs in at 1679 entries, though many of those are goofy duplications of email addresses that showed up when I botched an upgrade from 10.3.9 to 10.5.1.
Both MobileMe and .Mac have done an excellent job of keeping the AddressBook application data on all my 10.4 and 10.5 Macs up to date (though the 10.3 Macs were left out in the cold). Over the weekend, I added an iPhone to the mix, and started manually copying over changes from my old Nextel and deleting some of the crap from the botched 10.3 upgrade… something like 20 new contacts (mostly numbers only), 45 updates to existing contacts, and about 90 deletions of duplicate email address only junk. All those changes were done on my laptop in AddressBook.
Then a problem cropped up… I could not sync the changes that I’d made over the weekend to MobileMe. I logged into MobileMe on the web and verified… the changes were not there – though they were on my laptop. I contacted MobileMe support with the assumption it was a problem on the server end.
A very nice chat agent named Geoff S walked me through the issues and we figured out the problem was not with MobileMe at all, but with my AddressBook data, which had somehow become corrupt. We archived that data from AddressBook itself using “File/Export/Address Book Archive” from the menu. Then I manually did a sync where we reset sync data and used MobileMe contacts to wipe out my AddressBook data entirely, which flushed the corruption along with all my recent changes. I confess I was very nervous at this point in the process… but then I double clicked on the Archive of my AddressBook and again overwrite everything. That fixed the problem and now my AddressBook is able to sync normally again, and all my recent work is there.
I am manually resetting the sync data to all other Macs and the iPhone and it is working beautifully. An additional benefit, while exploring MobileMe via web browser (not something I normally do), I discovered that it is much easier to delete all the contacts with no name in the database, which effectively de-duplicates the 10.3 to 10.5 bug I ran into last year. I am definitely doing the happy dance, and can be counted as a happy MobileMe customer for the moment.
The following document might help you if you are having issues with MobileMe: http://support.apple.com/kb/TS1679.
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