iCloud Contacts Will Not Sync

None of the "workarounds" work for me as I don't have my contacts on my PC. They reside on my iPod Touch. It is set up to be backed up/sync'd with iCloud but it will not.

I now wonder if ANYTHING is being backed up.

For now, I am exporting my contacts to flat files for safekeeping and manually backing up to iTunes. I can't trust iCloud until they fix these problems.

(I'm sorry and purchased additional - now wasted - space.)

I believe Lion is required on your iMac.

I tried the vCard trick, but my phone would still not sync Contacts. What I did next got it syncing, so I'm posting this for those still struggling.

I blasted all my contacts from the Mac, which took them out of the cloud. iCloud Contacts were off on the phone and everything was in a stable state. I created one dummy contact in iCloud and then turned on Contacts sync on the phone. The contact synced! Then I dragged in the vCard which had all of my contacts into iCloud. Everything except for about 6 contacts synced with the phone. I then found the missing ones and did a copy / paste / delete old one for each on the Mac. It seemed best to wait for the new one to show up on the phone before deleting the old one on the Mac. But that worked. I had one that was stubborn and had to recreate it. I am completely in sync now and updates to Windows, iCloud, iPhone, Mac all seem to work and sync. I'm going to do extra checking for a while though.

I have an iPad 2, iPhone 4S, several iPods, a PC running iCloud, and a MacBook Air. All of these devices sync the same contact list perfectly except for the MacBook Air.

I backed up the contacts on the MacBook to vCard as suggested and then turned off iCalendar syncing with iCloud so that the contacts stored there would not be deleted when I deleted them from iContacts. When I did this, the system asked me if I wanted to delete all the contacts on the MacBook. I said "Yes", but it didn't do anything. When I reopened iContacts, all of the contacts were still there. I tried opening and closing it a couple of times to see if it just need to be refreshed, but to no avail. So I manually selected all the contacts and deleted them. I then went back to the iCloud settings and turned Contact syncing back on. The contacts all backed up to the MacBook perfectly and now everything seems to be working correctly. I created a few test contacts and they were immediately disseminated to all my other devices.

I would suggest to try leaving all your contacts on iCloud and then just wiping the devices you are having a problem with. You can then restore the contacts back from the iCloud by simply turning syncing back on.

As always, err on the side of caution and back up your contacts to vCard, even though, hopefully, you will have no need for the backup if everything works correctly.

I can't get contacts on the ipad (iOS 5.0) to sync with contacts on the MBP (10.7.2).

I tried exporting all contacts to vcard, wiping the contacts, and importing the contacts. But, when I try to import the vcard, address book crashes every time. (MBP). Glad I also exported an address book file while I as exporting the vcards. Otherwise I would have lost all my contacts (100's of them).

Obviously this is a problem with icloud. I will just wait for an update that fixes it.

Pretty annoying that my new ipad 2 can't populate its address book with info from address book on the MBP.

Since the new address book with the Lion upgrade (10.7.2) crashes when trying to import vcards, this looks like a problem with Lion. icloud can sync the calenders between the ipad and MBP no problem, but not contacts.

I hope they fix this soon. It's a core experience issue.

I finally managed to have the contacts synchronized with iCloud on my iPhone. In fact I had to disable Calendars and Reminders synchronization as it was interferring with other synchronized elements. I realized this after looking at the iPhone console in XCode that showed uninterrumpted errors when trying to connect to DAV server (HTTP 503 status):

Warn |==== CalDAV refresh FAILED for "name.surname@me.com" (XXXXXXX-YYYY-ZZZZ-WWWW-VVVVVVVV): Error Domain=CoreDAVHTTPStatusErrorDomain Code=503 "The operation couldn’t be completed. (CoreDAVHTTPStatusErrorDomain error 503.)" UserInfo=0x10e07240 {CoreDAVHTTPHeaders=<CFBasicHash 0x12093ec0 [0x3e593630]>{type = immutable dict, count = 8,

I wonder if I am the only one in this case and when I will be able to synchronize Calendars and Reminders.

i had an apple id as "rchheda" and mobile me email id as rchheda@mac.com which eventually became rchheda@me.com

now, while moving over to iCloud, it says mobile me will shift to iCloud using your email id: that is rchheda@me.com as your apple id. Now, when i already have an earlier apple id: rchheda, it does not work. Also, the email address associated with rchheda is not ready to be accepted by rchheda@me.com

is there any way to merge the two?

My iphone and iPad have moved over to the cloud. but the contacts on my iMac are not being synchronized over the air because of the user id issues. please help.

thanks,

rajesh

rchheda@me.com

I have a slightly different problem: while icloud has all of my contacts, and therefore my iPhone and iPad do as well, on my mac all I have are names. No email addresses, phone numbers, etc.

Any ideas?

To rgspencer,

Ironicallly I've seen this happen on the ipad before. Have you tried removing the icloud account from the Address Book preferences and re-adding it fresh?

Thanks KP, but I fixed it another way:

My contacts in icloud became sorted as last name, first name. My initial contacts were First Name, Last Name.

Once I changed the preferences back to FN, LN, the names and info reappeared. Thanks for your response.

"I blasted all my contacts from the Mac, which took them out of the cloud. iCloud Contacts were off on the phone and everything was in a stable state. I created one dummy contact in iCloud and then turned on Contacts sync on the phone. The contact synced! Then I dragged in the vCard which had all of my contacts into iCloud. Everything except for about 6 contacts synced with the phone. I then found the missing ones and did a copy / paste / delete old one for each on the Mac. It seemed best to wait for the new one to show up on the phone before deleting the old one on the Mac. But that worked. I had one that was stubborn and had to recreate it. I am completely in sync now and updates to Windows, iCloud, iPhone, Mac all seem to work and sync. I'm going to do extra checking for a while though."

I have tried what you did. The dummy account I created showed up in both iCloud and in the Mac's address book. I cannot, however, get the vCard to drag into iCloud. How do you get the vCard to actually go off your desktop into iCloud? As of right now, I only have my dummy account and need to get my phone numbers back. ugh!! So frustrating! Thanks in advance for any help you are able to give.

My problem was after adding a new number or editing any information on my iphone it was not pushing and changing the details on my mac or ipad.

I rectified the problem by going into preferences and altering the first name / last name diplay settings. Then everything synced and appeared.

Hope this helps any one else with similar problmes

tvj -

On my Macbook Pro I clicked down on the trackpad while over the vCard on the desktop and held the trackpad down. While the trackpad was held down and the vCard sellected, I did a Command Tab to get to Safari, where I had the iCloud site up and opened to contacts. Still holding down the trackpad, I dragged the vCard onto the Contacts page and that did it.

Hope this hepls.

I found that by unchecking and then checking the Contact box in the iCloud settings that it would ask you if you wanted to merge your contacts from your computer to the Claud and so it did and then synced with my iPhone.

This all worked for me, and online now from my mac into icloud i see all 536 contacts.

However, when i turned on the sync on iphone, it only brought over 400 even.

Anyone have thoughts on this?!?...besides deleting people I have not talked to in over a year lol.