I have a network of about 20 Macs in a small office (some remote.) We've been using Now Contact for years without much issue. We share about 5000 contacts in our organization.

We recently upgraded the server to Leopard, and also upgraded Now Server to the latest version (5.3.2.) Ever since then we've had a nightmare of the worst kind... random data loss on the client machines.

Basically, users report that contacts that were there one day, are gone the next. No warning, no pattern, nothing. Just random names, gone. I've confirmed that no one has deleted these contacts. They just disappear. I've checked the box in the Category menu to "alert user when a contact is deleted" (so they can revert the deletion) but this error dialog never comes up. I've changed the read/write and admin passwords for security (and just to eliminate that as a variable.)

And yet, every day, I hear about another contact that's gone missing. I'm seeing it happen myself; names that are there in the backup file are not there in the current file.

I'm at my wit's end, and have no idea how or why this is happening. I'd like to have Now Contact sharing safely... so I need feedback. I'm sure if this was a common issue there'd be a huge thread about it.

Should I rebuild the Now Server from scratch, and if so, what's the best way to do this?


ARGH!

I've completely rebuilt the server with a fresh new install. I moved contacts into a new category and used that to populate new contact files on our network.

And contacts are STILL randomly disappearing.

I've used Now Contact for close to a decade now, I know this app inside out, and it's just FAILING us now in a very big way. I'm beyond frustrated.

It is quite possible that a local client file is causing the issue. I would suggest having all users create a new primary local file, and connect the new files to the server. Then re-subscribe to the public categories. Any private contacts could be dragged or exported and imported into the new files.

This is exactly what we did. We created brand new local files, populated with data from a brand new server, for a test group of just two users, who are not deleting anything. And they are reporting that contacts that were there in the morning are no longer there in the afternoon.

Just today one got an alert about "this contact was deleted, would you like to restore it" and they were only given the option of restoring it to the Personal (ie: private) category.