I have used Novell Evolution for a few years now and it is an excellent PIM (Personal Information Manager). Other than a bone head move a few weeks ago, which killed all my email and contacts, I have not had any problems.

It had nothing to do with Evolution and I was able to restore from a backup. It was just frustrating more than anything. I guess that is a good argument for backing data up… ;)

Today however I loaded Ubuntu on a spare drive and when restoring .evolution one address book was gone. I thought that was very strange since /$HOME/.evolution/addressbook/local/ contained a folder other than system and it had addressbook.db and addressbook.db.summary. I tried creating the address book in Evolution and then manually copying the .db and .db.summary files into it, but no luck.

I did a little googling and came across a few posts that commented about shutting down the Evolution database server and restarting. This seemed like a logical thing to do, however I would have thought a reboot would have done the same but none the less I was game.
Find the PID of the server. Kill it and restart Evolution.

$ ps -ef | grep Evolution_DataServer
nobody     9657     1  0 20:02 ?        00:00:00 /usr/lib/evolution

/evolution-data-server-1.2
--oaf-activate-iid=OAFIID:GNOME_Evolution_DataServer_InterfaceCheck
 --oaf-ior-fd=50

$ kill -9 9657

Initially that did not do the trick so I decided to create the address book empty and then move addressbook.db and addressbook.db.summary into the new folder. After adding the address book I had to kill the DataServer again to get new folder to appear in .evolution/addressbook/local. Once I moved the new files to the new folder and restarted Evolution, both address books were there.