Birthdays in Contacts: some appear in Cal, some do not

It was never my intention to maintain two contact books. I do not know how that happened; that is part of the puzzle. How do I remove one or the other without losing some of the contacts? -jw

Hey C.

I performed the operation of deleting the On My Mac file after I exported it to an archive (a .abbu file).

I then imported the saved archive to my iCloud Contacts, where all the existing contacts were replaced. But this operation also restored all the files to On My Mac.

In any case, now ALL of my birthdays have now disappeared.

Something about the sequence of events? The exported contacts file was not a vcard file (seems to work only for individual cards), but the .abbu file; I presume that this is effectively the operation that you indicated.

I am sharing my Calendar with family; does this have some effect on displaying birthdays? Do I need to re-subscribe to Birthdays? Thanks. -jw

I did a Time Machine backup before I changed anything.

It was not possible to save the contacts as a vcard file (I could export individual vcards, but I would have to do that one at a time). The .abbu file restored everything. I also exported the iCloud contacts to a .abbu file under a different name.

Everything is working fine ... except Birthdays. Not worth losing sleep over, I think, just frustrating.

I just performed the following suggestion on the Apple Support page:

Turn iCloud Calendars off and back on

1. Quit Calendar (or iCal).
2. Choose Apple () menu > System Preferences > iCloud.
3. Remove the checkmark in the checkbox next to Calendars.
4. Close System Preferences and wait about a minute.
5. Open System Preferences and choose iCloud.
6. Replace the checkmark next to Calendars.
7. Close System Preferences.
8. Open Calendar (or iCal) and test to see if the issue has been resolved.

Still no effect.

I have already followed the instructions for Birthdays ( except the "wait a day" part):

If you include people’s birth dates in the information you have in iCloud Contacts, you can enable a special Birthdays calendar that displays them all.

Show or hide the Birthdays calendar

1. In iCloud Calendar, choose Preferences from the Action pop-up menu at the top of the window.
2. In the General pane, select the “Show Birthdays calendar” checkbox, then click Save.

The Birthdays calendar appears in the Calendars list below Subscriptions.

So now I am waiting to see if any Birthdays wiil be restored, but I am thinking, considering the related issues that others have posted, that this is a either bug, or a conflict with sharing with multiple devices, or a conflict with a now deleted google caldav. The only device I am using is my MacBook Pro; the other shared devices are iPhones belonging to family.

That all the news that fit to print. Thanks for trying! -jw

I tried that. But I can repeat again. It would give me very many vcards. Of course, I presume I can copy them all at once. Still, It is not obvious why to me I should not just export the entire Contacts list as one file. The restoration of the On My Mac contact list was unexpected when I restored to iCloud. -j

I understand all of this, except the abbu files were entirely new to me, and not revealed explicitly by the "Export" function.

There is no a priori reason to think that the iCloud contacts are connected in any way to On My Mac contacts. In fact, some people maintain separate iCloud contacts (which they want to sync with various devices) from other on their contact lists on their machine.

At one point in my confusion managed to get two sets of contacts on iCloud.

I am still guessing that the Birthdays problems is in some way caused by calender sharing. I share several with family, some of which have birthdays posted as independent events.

I found more details, and followed the below procedure, but it did not help (of course I still have the separate On My Mac contacts, which also have the Birthdays listed ... could be the problem)

http://support.apple.com/kb/TS4337#Clean_up_Birthdays___Use_the_Birthday_Calenda r

-j

No need to restore the backup. Everything is in place as it was originally, just not birthdays.

Why are you so hostile? The detailed troubleshooting guides on the Apple site show that many people are having related issues.

While the Birthday subscriptions is a convenient feature, there are other ways to do the same thing.

Unfortunately, there are many traps to unwittingy fall into in cyberspace, and the Birthdays subscription seems not to be a Apple feature that "just works".

Thanks for your help.

Live long and prosper.

I got the message in both the literal and figurative sense. I will try again later at some arbitrary time, , in the future. -j