How do I recover a single Contact via Time Machine?

Open the Contacts app, then open the contact card you want to recover, then click the Time Machine icon in the Menu Bar (you may need to enable it in System Settings > Control Center) and select Browse Time Machine Backups. Go back to a pre-edit version and click Restore.

For example, here's Apple's contact card in my contacts app, from a TM backup a month ago:

Here is what you can do:

1. Make a fresh backup to save all your current contacts data.
2. Restore a backup where the missing data is present.
3. Open Contacts and export the contact with the missing data. This will create a vCard file with all the contact data.
4. Restore your latest backup.
5. Open Contacts and delete the contact with the missing information.
6. Double-click the vCard file to import it in Contacts.

Well, it seemed like an elegant solution...but when I tried it, e.g. by adding a note to the Apple card, running a TM backup then looking in TM, it turns out that the note I added was in all the 'backups'. I then deleted the note, ran a backup and it was gone from all of them.

Apologies to the OP for the incorrect suggestion and thanks for the catch, dialabrain. I'll report this to Apple, since if you can browse individual cards back through Time Machine, you should be able to restore them and a new change should not show up in old backups. Maybe they'll blame Loki mucking around at the TVA.

larrybobba wrote:

Just to be clear, there is no backup where the missing data is present. The data I seek has been removed from ALL previous backups.

I admit that I find this surprising. The Contacts data is stored in '~/Library/Application Support/AddressBook' (the "~" is important.). Restoring the whole folder should have done the trick. Is this how you tried to restore the data?

I looked at my own backups and I can see that the Contacts databases have different dates for different backup dates, meaning that the databases in the backups are themselves different.

You don't you simply restore the Contacts app to a point in time that you know the contact was there.

Do you use iCloud to synchronize your contacts? If so, turn it off before restoring the older backup.

I submitted feedback on Feedback - Time Machine - Apple. I probably should have reached out to Loki for all the good that submission will do...the 'thank you' screen is signed by the Time Capsule Team, clearly a nonexistent group given that the product was discontinued 7 years ago and will not be supported at all by macOS 26. That one I will flag up elsewhere.

larrybobba wrote:

That said, what back up method do you guys recommend? (now that I no longer trust Time Machine)

Personally, I will stick with Time Machine. This issue (which I highly doubt will ever affect me) notwithstanding, it's been working fine. In particular, it works well with my NAS to back up all 5 Macs in the house.

larrybobba wrote:

Just to be clear, there is no backup where the missing data is present. The data I seek has been removed from ALL previous backups.

Unfortunately, I now believe I've lost the data forever.

The changing of those older backups you dutifully made might be a bug, you could consider reporting it to Apple because you have good documentation of what happened.

Looking forward, even if the current Time Machine is flawed for this, Contacts offers several ways to archive (backup) your current Contacts via the File =>> Export as PDF and File =>> Export commands. That won't recover what you had for that one contact but might be useful in the future. After reading your postings, I "exported" all my contacts just in case ...

Are you 100% certain that will work? I for one am not.