worse than just duplicate contacts...serious issue

This has actually been an issue for a few months, since I first updated my 3g to ios4. Now I have an iPhone 4 and because I had never bothered to deal with it on my 3g, restoring my i Phone 4 to the back up of my 3g has just transfered the same problem to the new phone.

The issue is that not only has syncing duplicated my contacts (not one or two times, but up to 6 or 7 times!), it has also merged numbers from other contacts and created quite a mess. When some people call it will give me 2 to 3 different names on the caller id and when I go through my contacts to find someone, of the sometimes 6 or 7 different contacts to choose from for one person each copy of that contact will have different or multiple numbers, so I have no idea if its actually them or someone else. It's an absolute nightmare.

The problem has always been this bad, so my inaction I don't believe has made this worse, other than the addition of new contacts to the mix. I've just recently seriously felt the effects of this by contacting the wrong people or thinking I was having text message conversations with one person when in fact is was totally not them : /

Any advice at all is greatly appreciated. The delete my contacts and then resync with mobile me is probably not an option as all of these duplicates and merged contacts exist on my mobile me contacts as well.

Thanks

Macbook Pro 2.4 i5 4gigs Ram, Mac OS X (10.6.6)

Posted on Feb 11, 2011 2:17 PM

20 replies

Mar 6, 2011 12:38 PM in response to fliplynch

Yep!! Have the same problem. Multiple duplicate contacts in iPhone. Used MobileMe for a while and now have unsubscribed, but it still seems to have those contacts in phone with no apparent means to delete them as a group. All I want to do is sync my contacts from my Outlook 2007 application.

nole62

Level 1

11 points

Mar 6, 2011 5:50 PM in response to Simon Dyer1

I do think it has a lot to do with "linked contacts". I tried to manually delete a few and that took their email addresses out of my groups. I deleted all and just tried to sync numbers from gmail but the duplicates are back. Can ANYONE help us with this???? It is VERY difficult to find the correct contact with the phone numbers.

Should we all go in to contacts on the computer and store all the info there?? How can we maintain group addresses and not have all the 4 or 5 listings of the same person?

Mar 6, 2011 11:59 PM in response to fliplynch

I also noticed a few (not many) of my contacts have disappeared from my phone. They r still in my address book if I pull up on PC. ?? I think I will just go back to Apple store this week with phone & PC & let the Genius guy fix it. They said when they were selling me the extended warranty it would cover any of these type problems I had. 🙂
This time I'll not leave the store until it is fixed. Will let u know what I find out later in the week. Maybe it is a glitch with the iPhone 4's? Anyone having this problem with a 3?

pataki

Level 1

9 points

Jun 10, 2011 6:58 PM in response to Simon Dyer1

i was having the same problem with my ipad. Multiple listings, some were even blank in the address section so i couldn't even delete the group itself.

i finally managed to correct it by going to the computer and erasing all data first by unsyncing the "sync address book contacts" when connecting the ipad to the itunes.

I then resynced it , and now i only have one of everything.

shukman

Level 1

0 points

Aug 22, 2011 8:43 AM in response to pataki

I have the duplication problems only for the contacts with 2 last names. I syncronize to my Gmail Contacts and I don't know why Gmail change the first last name to the second first name, and duplicate the contact.

Like you, I am very tired about delete all the contacts that appears wrongly.

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worse than just duplicate contacts...serious issue