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Contacts has a mind of its Own

Avatar Rick Churchill
I am at the point of despair. I have spent the whole of the afternoon and most of the evening trying to sort out my contacts. I found that most of my entries were duplicated on the Mac and some contacts that are long dead and I thought I had deleted, have reappeared. After using the duplicate feature in the menu only a few were merged.
Next I laboriously deleted about 200 contacts that appeared twice, plus those I no longer required.
Then I read that when there are entries on the Mac and in the cloud then these appear twice in All Contacts and so I had supposedly deleted some in the cloud and some on the Mac and would then had two incomplete contact lists!

Things get a bit hazy after that.

Later I deleted all the contacts on my phone and synched with the cloud.

Now I look at my computer and mysteriously everything is back. In fact I can delete the same contact from those All on My Mac list and All iCloud list and it reappears in the cloud list again.

But what is more important having synched my phone with the cloud not all the contacts appear although according to the Mac they are both in the cloud and on my Mac! I have spent some time researching “synchronising and deleting contacts” on the internet without success.

I am left with 500 cards on my Mac, 415 in the cloud and 233 on my phone! (I don’t know whether the Mac additional counts cards I have in local lists)

I think I will have another try on the weekend but if anyone has ideas of where to look or useful articles I would appreciate it.

Re: Contacts has a mind of its Own

Avatar Douglas Cheney
I have had a similar problem and I contacted Apple on [undisclosed telephone] and had help to sort it out very quickly

Re: Contacts has a mind of its Own

Avatar Rick Churchill
SOLVED - SORT OF
Someone gave me the idea of signing out of the Mac and the phone and signing back in again. Luckily I still had an iPad which was still signed in because in order to sign back in Apple required a code which it sent to other devices (and I think the device needed to be signed in).
Anyway after that I had 1144 contacts on the Mac and a similar number on the phone which was a bit of a shock! Some contacts had 4 entries. I was going to take Douglas's advice when I noticed that every time I checked, the number was reducing. The iCloud has deleted some, registered some as duplicates which I merged and this morning I am left with approx 247. There are just a few repeats left which have not yet been registered as duplicates or deleted.
So the answer is to sign out and sign in and then wait.

Re: Contacts has a mind of its Own

Avatar Mick Burrell
No chance you've been allowing Google (or similar) to synchronise Contacts too?

Re: Contacts has a mind of its Own

Avatar Rick Churchill
I try and avoid linking Google to anything!

I laboriously deleted all the duplicates, triplicates and quad (whatever the word is) entries by hand but there is still a slight discrepancy between All on My Mac, All iCloud, my phone and using my browser to look at the iCloud website.
All iCloud is 345, phone and website agree at 340 whereas there are 359 on the Mac. I still do not understand why there can be any difference in something that is suppose to synchronise.

It may have helped that I deleted all the smart lists, they are not available on iOS anyway and for good measure all the (non smart) lists on the Mac. I created new lists only on the All iCloud part of the Mac which are synchronised to my phone.
 
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