duplicate contacts

I am having similar issues. Asking Address book (local) to look for duplicate entries seems to bring by computer to a crawl. I've yet to get through the whole duplicate/merge process without address book crashing.

Eliminating iCloud address book on a local computer isolates the problem to iCloud, but there does not appear to be a way to merge duplicate entries on iCloud (this was available as an option two days ago, but no longer is there). Regardless, I have so many duplicate entries that iCloud seems to barf before it can get through the merger process. Several times I thought I had eliminated entries on my local machine, but it doesn't appear to push back to iCloud.com because I can literally watch duplicate re-entries appear on my local machine (very frustrating).

I am going to try saving a copy of the (duplicate entry) address book to my local Mac, and then try running the duplicate/merge option. If there is a way to then delete all address book entries in the cloud and then re-import the local (non-duplicated) list, I am going to try that.

Ironically, the copy of my address book that is now the cleanest is in Outook. I imported my contacts there a couple of weeks ago (syncing off) before moving from mobile me to iCloud when all of this chaos started.

When I signed in to the iCloud I had two lists of groups in my address book of my iMac and my iPhone 4, one was “In my Mac“ the other “in iCloud” they were the same, that means the groups were duplicated so the contacts as well, this was reflected mostly in my Whatsapp, the thing was that the contacts in my Mac weren´t updated whenever I sincronized the iPhone... Anyway, I tried some of the tips they have given You in this chat but none worked😟. What I did AND WORKED was; I sing out of iCloud in my iMac (in system preferences) and deleted my account in the phone, I said YES when the divices asked me to keep a copy of the contacts in each devise then in my Mac I looked for duplicates (at this point You´ll see all your groups duplicated, so your contacts as well), merge them and the ereased one of every group duplicated (any one, since they are the same) then I had just ONE LIST OF GROUPS AND NO DUPLICATES. After that I signed in to iCloud in my Mac and in my iPhone and there were no more goups duplicated. That´s it! 🙂

My contacts are syncing across 3 devices. I have done a full clean up of duplicates at least twice now. However, they keep reappearing whenever I edit a contact. The duplicates only appear on the device on which I edited the contact, they don't seem to be synced. But the edited contact is synced across devices.

I am thinking of backing up my address book and deleting all iPhone contacts and seeing what happens on other devices. And then restarting from the back up.

Also, if I delete the duplicate the original is also deleted!

Holy crikey. What a mess. I'm on day 3 of deletIng dups straight in the phone.

Right now: synced w cloud, yahoo, gmail and PC. I've deleted my cloud back up to start with. This leaves PC outlook. Im merging all email accounts info into the iPhone contact list so everything is in one place. Then I will do a fresh and clean backup on iTunes to create a good restore point with all apps updated etc.

remaining issue:

Q. is there a way to avoid resyincing contacts w email accounts on the pc? This creates contact entries of only email addresses since not all have numbers associated. Anyhow if dups appear again for these after the back up I'll then merge any contacts since I know that info is already stored in the iPhone contact lists. For any emails that appear w no #s I'll simply display contacts from my PC only.

I know my plan is flawed. It I haven't figured out how yet and the posts above are pretty confusing being that I'm new to all this.

It might be that you are syncing across so many accounts. Is it possible for you to sync only iCloud, or only Google for example?

My duplicates have now cleared up so far having turned iCloud off and then back on. Editing contacts also is not creating duplicates at the moment. So perhaps doing that will help you?

I was able to solve the duplicate entry problem by changing turning off iCloud on my local Mac and then saving a copy to my home computer. Running the duplicate entry/merge function then allowed me to identify all of the duplicate entries (10,000!) without bringing everything to a complete crawl.

Once I had a clean, non-duplicated version of my contacts on my local machine, I then turned off iCloud on all of my other devices and chose not to save a copy to the local device. I then logged on to iCloud and deleted all of my contacts from iCloud. Once this was complete, I saved a backup of my clean, non-duplicated contacts (export) and then turned iCloud back on. Voila, a clean version of my contacts appeared in iCloud and on all of my other devices.

This was obviously a bit of a pain, but it worked. My theory is that iCloud either has a bug in it that causes duplicate entries (entries rather than being seen as the same are seen as separate entries and then duplicates multiple as syncing occurs) and/or iCloud is not able to see changes made on the local machine fast enough such that it starts to push out an "updated" list of contacts prior to seeing the deletions made on the local machine. In either case, it is obvious that iCloud really struggles doing significant processing of contacts once you have more than 1000 - 2000 in your address book.

OK. I have now got rid of duplicates, fantastic, but still have one problem.

On my macbook there are 1072 contacts, on my ipad 1072 contacts but on my iphone only 553 contacts. I guess that somewhere I have ticked or not ticked a box correctly.

Any idea where please.

@stephen w

Next time you sync your iPhone, highlight your phone on the left side in iTunes. At the top of iTunes where it says, "Summary, Info, Apps, Ringtones..." click on on Info. Make sure the Sync Address Book Contacts checkbox is ticked. Slide on down to Advanced and under Replace information on this iPhone tick the Contacts checkbox. This should give you the same contacts on your iPhone as are on your computer.

And not to worry about future syncing, next time you sync none of the boxes under Advanced will be checked - you have to check that Advanced stuff manually - so your sync will go both ways.

@ russell

When you say the "sync will go both ways" does this suggest If iPhone contacts are added only to the iPhone, they'll get copied to Outlook? If there are no contacts in outlook will this guarantee only new ones are copied back to the pc?

SpecifIcally, I edited all the contacts on my phone getting rid of dups and linked contacts. Then I physically deleted all the contacts from my pc. I then did a backup since my phone was in a state I wanted. Next I did a sync and mysteriously all the contacts I deleted in outlook came back to my phone from thin air? I had to manually remove dups and old data again from my phone. Finally I turned of syncing entirely in iTunes for anything outlook related and did a backup on iCloud instead.

Ideally I'd like to get the contacts on my phone back into outlook w/o getting dups again in my phone or pc or iCloud. How would I achieve this?

Apologies, I have no idea if this works with Outlook. It will work with Apple's default Address Book.app, but I can't say any more than that.

Currently, a sync on my box adds any new addresses to either Address Book or the iPhone (whichever one was lacking) without duplicates; in like manner, deleting a contact on one will delete it off the other at the next sync. Once it's in Address Book on my computer, it's synced with iCloud. My post was intended to help those who discovered Address Book had all duplicate contacts after syncing with iCloud.

My suggestion is to get contacts correct one facet at a time - your iPhone OR your computer OR iCloud and work up from there. For example, forget iCloud for now and concentrate on your iPhone since you can restore from backup and you already have your contacts like you want them. Backup Outlook's contacts somewhere and delete your Outlook contacts from your computer. Sync contacts with Outlook, going 100% iPhone contacts/0% Outlook contacts. (I'm assuming that's what the iTunes sync does, sync contacts from iPhone to/from Outlook.) Hopefully this will copy your correct contacts from your phone to Outlook without duplicates. If it does, great! We're half way there. If it doesn't, no prob; you made a backup of your Outlook contacts just in case. If everything goes according to plan, you now have correct contancts in both Outlook and iPhone, and the next step is to add iCloud to the mix. That was where my post to steve w came in.

*sigh* That was a long winded explanation for "delete your Outlook contacts and sync with your iPhone," but I hope it helped.

The issues all stem from iCloud. In that Apple makes it a one way deal for third party apps. Software like Outlook and Spanning Sync currently have no way to write to the contacts in iCloud. Until Apple provides a way to do this duplicate entries will always come back if you have any apps that try to modify the address book. I have an older phone and my only iDevice is through work so my solution was to turn off iCloud (so everything else can sync). But if you plan on using iCloud it'll have to be exclusively.

duplicate contacts issue resolved.

thanks everyone

Yeah, I just had to do this as well. Perhaps changing the sync settings for my old iPod touch set off the problem. We'll see what happens. Good for now.