iCloud Contacts Will Not Sync

I phoned the UK help desk and they put me through to an iPhone expert in the US. She told me the non syncing of contacts etc from icloud to iPhone was a known fault and they are working on it (but not communicating about it!). That was in December.

I think a Vcard is the file on which each contact's details are stored (but don't ask me anything technical about it!)

"vCard is a file format standard for electronic business cards. vCards are often attached... The commonly-used filename extension for vCards is vcf. ..."

I had the same problem as Kevin: Address Book entries posted on my Mac did not show up on iCloud, iPhone or iPad.

I did however find these entries in my Outlook 2011 Contacts.

I moved the Outlook application to the trash as well as all the Outlook-related items that I cound find on my Mac, including contacts (all created on Mac Address Book and absent from iCloud).

New contacts on my Mac now sync to iCloud and devices. I just don't have Outlook anymore, which suits me just fine.

B.

Make sure you have an iCloud account set up in Address book.

1. Open address book, select preferences
2. click on the accounts tab
3. If you don't see and iCloud account; hit the + button. Select iCloud from the "account type:" drop down.
4. Enter your account info.
5. iCloud.com should sync your contacts now.

I found the steps for this and iCal here

I did that - everything is set to iCloud account. I even deleted address book contacts so now all I have is icloud contacts. My Outlook contacts sync to icloud and address book. But they still don't sync with my iPhone 4.

I'm reposting this old message from myself, as it may help. Everything has worked well for several months since I posted this:

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.

***You can repair your iCloud Contact groups without vCard exports***

I found that updates made on my mac carried over to all contacts and all iCloud on my ipod and ipad via iCloud. However, iCloud apprently does not recognize older contact groups that were created before I migrated to iCloud.

1. To resolve this, I went into each group, selected one contact, and then went to EDIT>Selected All to select all contacts within the group.
2. Then I went to File>New Group from Selection and created a new group and gave it a slightly different name, such as changing .
3. I verified that the new group was now available on all of my devices on iCloud and then deleted the old groups on my mac, again verifying that the old groups were removed from my iPhone and iPad.
4. The new groups had all of the contacts and reflected all of my recent updates.

Hope that this helps others who had the same issue that I had with updating contact groups on iCloud

I discovered just now that a contact that I had added to my iPhone when NOT connected to WIFI (several weeks ago) did not later transfer to my iCloud (on the web) or my computer's address book, even though I had connected via WIFI untold times after adding the contact.

Here is what I did:

First I made sure I was connected to my WIFI network. Then in iCloud preferences, for both the iPhone and my computer, I unchecked contacts, keeping the data on both my Mac and iPhone. I then turned them back on and merged them, but still the contact did not appear!

I then decided to edit the contact on my iPhone. I watched it upload the data (the little round star-like network activity icon started working)... The contact then appeared seconds later in my iCloud.

I then scrolled to the bottom of each address book and confirmed that there were the same number of contacts in each of them... I can only hope that all the data within each entry matches!

***You can repair your iCloud Contact groups without vCard exports***

I found that updates made on my mac carried over to all contacts and all iCloud on my ipod and ipad via iCloud. However, iCloud apprently does not recognize older contact groups that were created before I migrated to iCloud.

1. To resolve this, I went into each group, selected one contact, and then went to EDIT>Selected All to select all contacts within the group.
2. Then I went to File>New Group from Selection and created a new group and gave it a slightly different name, such as changing .
3. I verified that the new group was now available on all of my devices on iCloud and then deleted the old groups on my mac, again verifying that the old groups were removed from my iPhone and iPad.
4. The new groups had all of the contacts and reflected all of my recent updates.

Hope that this helps others who had the same issue that I had with updating contact groups on iCloud

I found this worked as well. However, in my case, I didn't need to redo every group.

I'm syncing an iPhone 4 and a Mac with Lion. Until this point, no syncing had taken place at all.

I turned off syncing of addressbook contacts in my iCloud settings. (I didn't delete the contacts.) Then turned it back on. Then, as soon as I added a new group, syncing kicked in. Within a few minutes, all of my contacts were correctly synced on my iPhone 4.

In order to sync all your contact to iCloud is actually easy. First you will need to sync all your contact to google contacts. Once you have all your contact in google you create different groups as many as you seem fit. Once this is complete go to the more TAB when viewing contacts then select export contacts. It will give you options on what to sync. If you created different groups you will want to sync the groups individually and change the names in your download folder. If you don't have groups you will select all contacts. You will export them vCard format only. Once this process is completed you can log in to iCloud and import all your contacts.

I hope this helps

My partner also had the problem that contacts created on her mac did not sync to icloud. In addition to ensuring that she had an icloud account, we also had to change the default account from On My Mac to iCloud.

We followed these steps:

1. Open Address Book application on the mac.

2. Select Preferences... from the Address Book menu.

3. Select General tab.

4. Set the Default Account option to iCloud.

Once we changed her Address Book preferences, her new mac contacts synced to iCloud.

I found a way around this.

In address book on my mac, I found that the default account was set to "On My Mac". I changed that to iCloud. (Address Book menu Item | Preferences | General | Default Account).

Next, I created a contact using the address book on the mac.

Finally, I went to contancts on my iPhone, clicked on the "Groups" back button to show all my groups. The groups back button turned into a refresh button that seems to sync the contacts.

And boom, the contact I created on my mac was now on my iPhone!!

Hope this helps.

Cheers!

I went into the iCloud settings on my iPhone and unselected Contacts from the sync options. I then connected my iPhone to my pc and it began the usual sync routine. It it got to the contacts, it stopped and warned me that I was about to lose 25% of the contacts on my PC. I stopped the sync at that point and disconnected from the PC. I went back to the iPhone iCloud controls and selected Contacts. I then hooked the iPhone back up to the PC and let it go through its sync routine. All of my contacts that were added to the PC are now on my iPhone.

I have an odd issue, on my mac I have 258 contact using iCloud only, on the web site I only have 183 contacts and on th iPhone I have 213 contacts.

I don't get it, I don't have any groups that the contacts are in.

Cheers,

Steven

Fozzieb Stephen), iCloud & iPhone sometimes reject some contact synchronizations because the contact notes, etc make the contact size go above the assigned limit (which I think is 128kB).