Lion - Address Book Duplicates

If the "Look for Duplicates" feature did not work for you, you are not alone. Here's another solution. Open Address Book Preferences and view the accounts. In all likelihood you have 2 iCloud Accounts. This would have happened if you joined iCloud early without setting up a free "me.com" e-mail address like myself. When I finally decided to change my Apple ID to my "me.com" address to benefit from iCloud Mail, my entire address book and Birthday's in the Calendar duplicated. So the solution to to simply delete the old iCloud Account which is for all intense and purposes a duplicate of your actual iCloud account. Problem solved.

I posted this in another thread on Address Book duplicates and iCloud. Did this start after the iCloud hoopla? After I tried iCloud, I ended up with duplicate contacts on my computer. The "Look for Duplicates" command in Address Book gave me soemthing to the effect, "No duplicates found," which raised my blood pressure as I could see them right there.

Going to System Preferences did the trick for me. Click on iCloud under Internet & Wireless. Untick the checkbox for Contacts. You'll then be given a choice of keeping your iCloud contacts on your computer, with the options of Delete from Mac or Keep Contacts. No, you don't want to delete the contacts from your box, so choose Keep Contacts. Let it do its thing, then re-tick the Contacts checkbox.

Like I said, at least for me this solved the problem with no more duplicate entries on my box or my iPhone.

This worked for me too! I think it was triggered when I set Address Book to sync with Google. Suddenly I had two of everything. So I followed russell's instructions, and now all the duplicates are gone. Interestingly, when I look at my list of accounts in Address Book, the "On My Mac" category is now gone. All of the contacts now live in iCloud. Previously, one set of duplicates lived on my Mac and the other set lived in iCloud.

--russell wrote:

I posted this in another thread on Address Book duplicates and iCloud. Did this start after the iCloud hoopla? After I tried iCloud, I ended up with duplicate contacts on my computer. The "Look for Duplicates" command in Address Book gave me soemthing to the effect, "No duplicates found," which raised my blood pressure as I could see them right there.

Going to System Preferences did the trick for me. Click on iCloud under Internet & Wireless. Untick the checkbox for Contacts. You'll then be given a choice of keeping your iCloud contacts on your computer, with the options of Delete from Mac or Keep Contacts. No, you don't want to delete the contacts from your box, so choose Keep Contacts. Let it do its thing, then re-tick the Contacts checkbox.

Like I said, at least for me this solved the problem with no more duplicate entries on my box or my iPhone.

You realize that your contacts will now no longer sync between your Mac and your iPhone right?

I followed Russell's instructions and contacts do appear to be successfully syncing between Address Book on my Mac and on my iPhone. Changes that I make on one device are reflected on the other. According to iTunes, my contacts are being synced over the air.

Put a new contact on your Mac, call it test, see if it appears on your iDevices

Thanks, this does seem to be resolving the issue for me. Should just amplify these steps by saying I was able to use "Look for duplicates" command right after unchecking Contacts in System Preferences, which then found and allowed merging something like 2300 dups for me, thank goodness. Probably reclaimed a cpl terabytes of space on my iPhone that way.

Worked for me too...thanks

bw

Had the same problem, this fixed it, thank you. Unclicking and reclicking the iCloud Contacts preference forced a merge of the local and server accounts, resulting in a single data set.

Awesome Russell - had the same problem just forced the resynch between the macbook pro and Icloud and no duplicates. Cheers dude

hi

Apple newby here. I know have Apple everything Pad, Phone and Macbook air, but still suffer terrible migration pains..

I managed the deduplication, but now when I add a new test address in Address book it doesn't synch to the Ipad or Iphone or my Icloud if I login via the web,,

Using Lion

in Address book accounts I have Icloud ticked

in System prefereences internet Icloud I unticked and ticked Contacts

Any ideas

thank

Richard

I am eager to try the fix described above when I get to my office tomorrow. Sounds too easy...but at this point, I'll try anything. Sounds like others have had success.

I suspect my trouble with duplicates upon synching has to do with Lion clients connecting to a Snow Leopard OS X Server. My collection of devices includes 2 iPhones, 1 Lion iMac running stand-alone, and 2 Lion iMac's connecting to Snow Leopard Server. The client machines aren't using the Server's address book implementation, but have the users home directory located on the server.

I can get things going so that the 2 iPhones, the standalone iMac, and the Cloud all report the same number of contacts, with no duplicates. This config will remain stable indefinitely (have tested 2 days). But the moment I try to include in the sync one of my office iMacs configured for user home directories on the Snow Leopard Server, the duplicates appear...just minutes later.

Does anyone else share a similar setup?

--russell wrote:

Going to System Preferences did the trick for me. Click on iCloud under Internet & Wireless. Untick the checkbox for Contacts. You'll then be given a choice of keeping your iCloud contacts on your computer, with the options of Delete from Mac or Keep Contacts. No, you don't want to delete the contacts from your box, so choose Keep Contacts. Let it do its thing, then re-tick the Contacts checkbox.

This did it for me too. If you have a lot of contacts, you may need to wait a minute or two for the change to take effect before you re-tick the checkbox. Thank you Russell!

Thank you so much. This has been annoying me since upgrade at last I have one merged iCloud address book.

You forgot to mention "Merge" after you re-tick contacts. Do we need to merge them? I am having a terrible time here and need some tutoring. I have done the above, but I still have duplicates. HELP!

UPDATE:

I just went to the Address Book menue on my iMac and looked for duplicates, merged them, and now they seem to have dissapeared. I hope they stay gone. I assume they will dissapear from my iPod and iPad also.....correct?