Two Apple IDs, Two Icloud accts, two contact data bases??

Question

Level 1

4 points

Two Apple IDs, Two Icloud accts, two contact data bases??

Hi all, I hope you might help me sort this mess out. Thanks in advance.

I have two Apple IDs - one of those ids is tied to iTunes and is my primary account, as it is linked to the Itunes store, my Iphone and Ipad. It has 5gb of which 4 is used for backups, etc. Aside from all my Iphone stuff, the data of importance is my contacts db that includes all my iphone contacts.

The other Apple ID was issued by Apple when I started to use MobileMe. It has a me.com address. When Apple moved to iCloud I got this account switched and also got 25gb of space that is good until Sept 2013. I have used about 2gb of space on that. The only data of importance on it is the contacts, and this has a mix of some Iphone contacts as well as contacts I added as I was using one of the macs.

It seems that I did not grasp the limitations of Icloud and did not notice that my macs - MBP and MBA were and are storing my contact data using different accounts. Both contacts db's are full of duplicates as well as there are approx 200+ contacts that are in one or the other contact db, but not both.

So, I think I might merge the two into one contact db, then stop using the me.com acct.

To get to this state I would presume that I should export the contacts from both accounts, then open up one of them in the contact app of my choice, then import the second export, and then do the clean up. Then I would upload the clean file back to my primary icloud acct.

By uploading a clean contact db that is corrected and duplicate free, how do I tell icloud to replace the db that is there with the one that I am uploading?

I have found nothing in tech articles, or discussions that suggest that the approach will work -- I am unsure that by uploading a clean contact db, I will not simply duplicate the names and addresses that are already there, along with adding the 200+ contacts that are not there.

Perhaps I delete the contact db from icloud - but again I see no information on that.

Posted on Mar 23, 2013 5:56 PM

Reply

Answer 1

randers4

Level 9

63,519 points

Mar 23, 2013 7:00 PM in response to geomon

geomon wrote:

It seems that I did not grasp the limitations of Icloud and did not notice that my macs - MBP and MBA were and are storing my contact data using different accounts.

Are they syncing with different iCloud accounts? i.e., is one Mac syncing contacts with your me.com account and the other syncing contacts with the account you want to keep?

Reply

Answer 2

geomon Author

Level 1

4 points

Mar 24, 2013 6:43 AM in response to randers4

Randers4 - thanks

yes, they are syncing with different icloud accts.

geomon

Reply

Answer 3

randers4

Level 9

63,519 points

Mar 24, 2013 11:26 AM in response to geomon

Then you should be able to just do the following:

On the Mac that is syncing contacts with the me.com iCloud account you are abandoning, open your contacts and export them as a vCard (File>Export>Export vCard). Attach this to an email and send it to yourself.
Open the email on your other Mac and double-click on the attachment to import the contacts. The contacts should be merged with the contacts already on this Mac, as well as to the iCloud account the Mac is syncing contacts with.
You can then clean up your duplicates by, for example, opening Address Book (Contacts) on your Mac, going to Card>Look for Duplicates, then merging any duplicates it finds.

You can then go to System Preferences>iCloud on the Mac that is syncing your me.com account, sign out of that account (which will delete any synced data), then sign into the iCloud account you are keeping and check the data you want to sync (which will sync the iCloud data to this Mac).

Reply