I've seen many postings on this topic - there seems to be many answers!

I think my address book is stored in a mysql db somewhere.

If so, is it possible to access it using say, MySQL Navigator?

Ubuntu 12.04
KDE 4.8.1

You address book will be located where the Kontact configuration specifies it is. The MySQL database used internally is only supposed to be a cache, and is not the primary source of data.

Have you checked ~/.local/share/contacts/?

Thanks, yes had already checked ~/.local/share/contacts/
This is confusing - have just re-installed Ubuntu and also imported a numbrt of .vcf files from my backup.
I couldn't find where they went but have just noticed that the address book is empty which is why ~/.local/share/contacts/ was empty!

Thanks for your help, I think I'll forget about the missing imports.

As a future protection against data loss, I believe KAddressBook does allow you to export your address book, which is definitely recommended.

> I believe KAddressBook does allow you to export your address book, which is definitely recommended.

How is that done, please? This is my problem. I would like to include my Kmail address book in a periodic backup but have been unable to find it. I have found several kabc directories, one of which ~/.kde/share/apps/kabc contains nine std.vcf* files but all are empty - displayed as 0b. I am using Kubuntu 10.4 (but about to move to 12.04).

Sayers wrote:How is that done, please?

It's simple as File → Export.

By right-clicking on book and choosing Properties you can check where addresses are stored.
Recently I was trying to regenerate Akonadi database and I had one problem: Personal Contacts address book had empty path (yet contacts definitely were there). In Personal Information KCM module I had Personal Contacts associated with some Akonadi resource, which was pointing to ~/.kde/share/apps/kabc/something.vcf or similar. That file was empty. I decided to export all my contact books to files, stopped akonadi, deleted it's database (~/.local/share/akonadi and ~/.config/akonadi) and started it again. Then I set up all my address books as single vcf files. This way, if something fails, at least I will know where my contacts are and how to import them.

Thank you ! That led me to a solution : Kmail => Tools => AddressBook => File => Export gave me five options : vCard 3.0 ; vCard 2.1 ; CSV file ; LDIF file and GMX file. Of those five only CSV meant anything to me but I tried each in turn and found each to produce a readable result. I will make a point of including the first of those in my next backup.

But it left me still puzzled as to where these addresses are stored. A bit more poking around - the vertical Address Books field down the left side, clicked on Personal Contacts (the only entry), that offered Address book properties and thence Akonadi Resources and Directory /home/keith/.local/share/contacts/ . That seemed clear enough so I came back out and went in to Dolphin and found the share directory no problem - but there was nothing 'contacts' in there - not a folder nor a file nor a hidden. I even did a Kfind on 'contacts' but got no result. So I am still left with the original enquiry - albeit now only out of curiosity - where is the address book stored?

We would need someone with deeper Akonadi knowledge. I believe that you will see your contacts with akonadiconsole tool (you may need to install additional package - search for akonadi in your package manager). Perhaps they are stored in Akonadi database, somewhere in ~/.local/share/akonadi/db_data/ dir.

As far as I know, Akonadi is just caching mechanism, so that data should be synced with some directory/file/remote resource. If it is not, then it may be bug. But I know far too little to judge that.

Interesting, the ~/.local/share/contacts/ directory should exist. It's disappearance definitely indicates your system has a problem. In this case, Akonadi probably has it marked as "unavailable" or "offline" and so is building a list of changes - which appear to be in the database.

I would *strongly* recommend making a backup of your contacts, then exit all pim applications and shutdown Akonadi (akonadictl stop). Then create the directory and start Akonadi again and see if the directory gets populated.