iCloud makes restoring a Contacts archive impossible???
My Contacts data got botched up. Now I'm looking for a strategy to restore it. The old way, restoring from an archive, no longer works because iCloud immediately replaces the restored data. It used to be possible under MobileMe to restore from an archive and have the local data replace that on MobileMe. So, the only alternative left is to restore from Time Machine. However, TM restore works only on a group-by-group basis which makes this task hugely time consuming. Each time I recover a group, Contacts finds duplicates that are also in previously recovered groups, and since Contacts is so incredibly bad at understanding duplicates (it thinks two people at the same company constitutes a duplicate!), I have to manually review each and every card to be imported. With 1400 cards and 20 groups, this is going to take days.
Apple wants $20 just to listen to my question. Pathetic.
Any suggestions about how to restore cards AND groups from an archive, Time Machine, or .vcf files?
I can't believe how abysmally bad Contacts is. How can the company that makes such brilliant and complex apps as Aperture and Final Cut get something as basic as Contacts so horribly wrong?
Contacts-OTHER, OS X Mountain Lion (10.8.2)