Mac OS Contacts app not syncing correctly with iPhone Contacts via iCloud

Question

Mac OS Contacts app not syncing correctly with iPhone Contacts via iCloud

The most recent updates to Mac OS / iCloud sync left me with duplicate entries in my Contacts app. I used my iPhone to clean up the duplicates while I was away on a trip. Now I'm back, and the Contacts app on my Mac mini is decimated - at a guess, it's missing all of the items that were marked as duplicates, but I can't be 100% sure of that.

On my iPhone and on iCloud.com, the Contacts entries appear to be correct; on the Mac, I'm missing perhaps 20-30% of the entries (and, oddly, ALL the custom photo IDs I had attached to cards are now missing?!). I'm left feeling very uncertain where all my Contacts are and not so great about the stability of iCloud syncing... I know for sure what's on the iPhone is "right" and what's on the Mac is "wrong," so I want to replace the latter with the former while not risking damage to the iPhone.

Here's the devices involved:

iPhone 12 Pro Max (iOS 16.1.1)
Mac mini 2018 (Mac OS Ventura 13.0.1)
Contacts.app (version 2536)

Here's what I'd like to accomplish:

Delete all the entries in Contacts on my Mac
Download a clean copy of the entries from iCloud.com
Populate Contacts on the Mac with the iCloud.com data
Not lose any more data, especially what's on iCloud.com

Any help anyone can give me for resolving this would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

Richard Millward

Mac mini, macOS 13.0

Posted on Nov 28, 2022 3:23 PM

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Answer 1

Best reply

James Brickley

Level 5

4,636 points

Nov 28, 2022 5:58 PM in response to RichardMillward

Go to iCloud.com and Contacts, click the gear bottom left, select all and then export vCards. There are typically a couple of backups of Contacts on iCloud.com under the main grid-dot menu top-right and Data Recovery -> Restore Contacts. Exporting vCards gives you an extra backup which is always a good thing.
Connect the iPhone to the Mac with the Lighting to USB-A or USB-C cable. Trust the Device when prompted, authenticate on the iPhone when prompted. Open Finder and highlight the iPhone in the sidebar. Backup your iPhone to your Mac fully. If you use iCloud backup switch it back to iCloud backup after you have a full backup completed.
On the Mac in System Settings -> search for iCloud and then turn off Contacts. You will be prompted wether or not to keep the data. Tell it NO you don't want to keep a copy of the data on the Mac. Give it some time, a few minutes. Then turn iCloud Contacts back on and it should sync your contacts back to the Mac from iCloud. If you have a large number of contacts, give it some time to complete.

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Answer 2

Nov 30, 2022 9:14 AM in response to James Brickley

Thanks so much for the information. I'm finally home and can implement the instructions. Here are some clarifications for anyone finding this solution via Search later on:

Step 3 did not work completely for me: I ended up with duplicate items again (not ALL but about 60-70%; its strange that it would not be "all" or "none")
With the combination of the "new" iCloud and Contacts.app in Ventura, you are not able to "Export to vCards..." as in Step 1 above -- instead it now immediately triggers a import into Contacts, which is not what you want. I was not able to use the export feature to make a backup just to my local hard drive any longer. Perhaps there's a setting somewhere that governs this behavior, but I was unable to find it.
In Step 3, In Ventura, I was NOT prompted whether or not to keep the existing contact items -- it just removed them without my explicit go-ahead (which was a little disturbing).

I used Contacts.app on the Mac to individually delete the duplicates, selecting the second of the two items.

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Mac OS Contacts app not syncing correctly with iPhone Contacts via iCloud

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