How do I get rid of duplicate contact entries?

One reason you may have duplicates is that you have each contact listed under your 'iCloud' account AND under your 'on my mac' account. Only contacts in the iCloud account will sync.

Click on the ribbon in the Address Book to reveal 'Users & Groups', and then by selecting each account on the left side you will see which contacts are in which account. (make sure nothing is typed in the search field)

If this is the reason you have duplicates you have two options of dealing with the situation. Either you can leave the duplicates alone and click on one account or the other before clicking on the ribbon again to limit what you see to that account when you return to the main part of your Address Book.

Or you can delete all the contacts from one account (usually the 'on my mac' account if you want to continue syncing with iCloud). Click on the account you want to delete contacts from on the left side of the Address Book and select the first contact in the list on the right, shift click the last contact to select all and delete.

Finally, You may want to check your default account is set correctly in the Address Book preferences.

OK, I just tried deleting the contacts "on my Mac' where I had 33,000 as opposed to 1200 in iCloud and have successfully deleted ALL MY CONTACTS on every device, iPad2, iPhone 4S, iMac and iCloud! Now what?

Ok, I managed to undo and get my contacts back. So here is my problem: for some reason the contacts on my Mac have duplicated (triplicated, decimated) from 1200 actual contacts to 33,000 with as many as 10-12 copies of the same contact. Additionally all the contacts have copious notes from my previous efforts to merge contacts. Can any one tell me how I can get the On My Mac contacts to have only one contact?

thanks

If they are coming from an old mobile me account, it should show up in groups and users. Take a look at system preferences > mail, contacts and calendars and see if you have a secondary account listed there.

So, nobody really seems to have a solution to this other than to try to undo this problem everytime it happens? Now that we all have multiple Apple devices, why can I not synch those devices without Contacts and iCal events multiplying everytime? I'm not a techie, but it seems I shouldn't have to be to prevent this from happening and to undo it when it does.

I have the same problem.. if we may even find a good and fast tool that sorts the problem locally on the iphone/ipad, everything then is re synch with the icloud so.. we need a tool to manage the things from both sides the device and the the icloud..

Then something i don't get: if i have 5000 contacts on the icloud (partially duplicated) and 7000 something contanct on my device the question is:

1) the icloud is or is not a full backup of my contacts?

2) how come this discrepacy?

3) i can link contacts within my iphone.. lets get a merge putton instead, that will burn duplicates on the phone and in the icloud (can be done using an unique ID for each contact record so that if the iDevice send to icloud the new info also will tell burn ID x, y, z)

I hope sorts this out quick.. it will be unmanageble soon..

P.S. Facebook status: Who needs the Facebook status in the contacts? are the contacts live? i don't think so.. otherwise what's the mess with these duplications? If i want to put additional info, names, nicknames to my buddies why having them replaced with faceboob names and generate an additional contacts entry?

Apple needs to sort this out.. i think the job is not complete in this area..