iSync & Address Book. PLEASE HELP!!!

This bug has been documented many times within these discussion groups. It popped up with a Leopard update. The workaround is to delete all Groups from your address book, and then you will find it will sync. We are all waiting to see if it is fixed in 10.5.5.

Jazzter,

Thanks for the suggestion, but unfortunately it didn't work for me here.

Has anyone really had this work?

J.E. Flynn

I am also having this problem. It actually started when I synced to MobileMe and lost all 600+ contacts. Apple didn't seem to care very much, and I was able to restore from a backup several months old, but now I am unable to sync Address Book to my Palm.

If I delete all my groups, then I can no longer send emails to the groups. Will I have to delete and recreate the groups every time I sync? When can we expect 10.5.5?

I have the same problem with a plain old cell phone (Motorola Razr V3). I have updated information on my address book, but when I "Sync Devices," the new contact information does not show up. New groups created in Address Book also don't show up as options to Synchronize to. Ugh!

Is there any other work-around than deleting ALL the Address Book groups? I rely on these groups, and it would be a big pain to have to recreate them. It seems like iSync is looking at it's own database instead of the Address Book database. Isn't there some way to force iSync to update to Address Book (like by Trashing the old iSync database file)? Any further suggestions would be appreciated.

Rangeley,

Your problem is quite different to the one being discussed.

Follow the instructions in the Tech Note here:

http://support.apple.com/kb/TS1627

Thank you for the advice, though it somehow seems to have gotten me in more trouble. Perhaps you or someone else can advise me further...

In my current Address Book I have ~20 groups defined. When I launched iSync this morning, it only showed about 10 of these in the "Synchronize" options for my cell phone. Those 10 were old ones, established long ago. So it seems that iSync isn't getting updated information from Address Book.

So I tried the two procedures suggested in the Tech Note as advised. The first procedure had no noticeable effect. The second seems to have wiped out my iSync database, but without updating it to my Address Book information. Address Book contents remain unchanged, but now under "Synchronize" I can only select "All Contacts."

Please help!

First, I would suggest making a backup of both your Address Book and iCal data by:

In Address Book, choose Export > Address Book Archive... from the File menu.
In iCal, choose Back up iCal... from the File menu.

Then you have a full backup if anything else happens.

Next make a backup of the "SyncServices" folder located at:

Macintosh HD/Users/ {your username}/Library/Application Support/SyncServices

Finally, delete the above SyncServices folder and restart the Mac. This will force the OS to re-create the folder and hopefully re-instate the link between your Address Book groups and iSync.

+(It does say in the above Tech Note not to manually remove the SyncServices folder, and to use the reset procedure you've already tried. However, by backing up your Contacts and Calendars first, you don't risk losing any data).+

No luck.

I did as you suggested. After the restart, a new SyncServices folder and various contents were created as you predicted. But when I started iSync, it showed no changes. My Address Book still has a big list of Groups, but iSync (under Contacts - Sychronize) only shows the option of "All Contacts."

I tried a Sync on the phone in question. The phone was reset, and no contact information was downloaded (apparently because iSync isn't getting any information from Address Book). Of course this is now especially frustrating as I have an "empty" phone, a "full" Address Book on my iMac, and no means to even get my old, out-of-date information into the phone.

I appreciate your attention to my dilemma. Please, please pass on further suggestions!

How about this:

1) Make sure you have a full backup of your Mac Address Book Contacts
2) Drag each of your Contact groups to the desktop, to create a vCard of each
3) Delete all your Address Book groups and Contacts
4) Quit Address Book
5) Double-click on each vCard Address Book group you dragged to the Desktop to re-import them into Address Book
6) Quit Address Book again
7) Open iSync with your fingers crossed, and hope it sees the Groups now.

Before diving into this, I tried steps 1-5 but with only one group. Double-clicking on the group vCard imports the contents of the group, but not the actual group. So I'm afraid if I follow this, I'll lose my groups (one of which is set up with the contacts I want on my phone). Any thoughts?

OK, I realized I could use "Last Import" to semi-manually reconstruct each group. I deleted all contacts and groups and then reconstructed just the one group, for my phone. That worked. But then when I tried modifying a couple of contacts in Address Book, and then ran an iSync sync. The changes were not recognized. So it seems I have to follow this rather un-Apple procedure to update my cell phone. Not what I had hoped for!

Thanks a great deal for your help. If any other thoughts arise, please pass them on.

Try resetting the sync history again, now that it's partially working. Non-updating phones can often be kicked back into life by a quick Reset Sync History...

It won't let me. Reset Sync History is greyed out. (Perhaps because it was already done before all the Address Book contortions, though I have run a couple of syncs since that point.)

dear group
I have the same problem. I sync with my SE W880i (with a mac meets mobile plugin) flawlessly, and after one year of perfect operation it just stopped working. Calendars and everything works but the addressbook doesn't.
I finally, after reset phone, delete all com.addressbook.plist, sync plist, deleting all contacts, reimporting them from a adress book file, and loosing about 2 hours of time
I came back to a backup of my adress book file, which I created 2 month ago.
Importing this resolved the issue, obviously loosing all info entered since my last backup.
This makes me think that the actual DATA in the adress book is the culprit for the isync app not to write data to my phone anymore.
This bug started with me after I did a sync with ME, the new service of apple. I do not know however if this is really related to this sudden incapability to sync my addresses to my phone or just a coincidence.
I have a really bad track record with all the apple services, which I use since they started to exist. .mac I do not sync since it always messed up my keychain data, EVEN choosing "do not update keychain". Sync with .mac also happend to write data of one contact into the file of another.
So every now and then I have to "clean" all my contacts which have other peoples emails etc.
Quite absurd. And now this.
w

As you are using a third-party plugin, have you contacted the authors of that plugin for assistance? They would be the best people to advise...