I set up a WebDAV addressbook in evolution, and copied lots of contacts in to it. But when I restarted evolution, they weren't there any more: the addressbook was suddenly empty.
This was for evolution 3.4.4 in Fedora 17.
It appears to be a version of this bug
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+s...on/+bug/883417
The work-around is to find and kill the /usr/libexec/evolution-addressbook-factory process. When I did that, and restarted evolution, all the WebDAV contacts reappeared.