Apple Event: May 7th at 7 am PT
HELP
Many of the contacts on my Mac have only some of the data listed (mostly name and group) but phones, addresses, notes, etc. are missing. The data on iCloud and my iPhone is all intact.
The number of contacts on my Mac and iCloud are identical.
I am unable to sync the complete data to the Mac and I have tried many of the methods suggested in the discusion groups.
Please HELP.
Shuka
iMac, Mac OS X (10.7.3)
Back up all data.
Triple-click the line below to select it:
~/Library/Address Book Plug-Ins
Right-click or control-click the highlighted line and select
Services ▹ Reveal
from the contextual menu.* A folder should open with an item selected. Quit the application if it's running. Move the selected item to the Desktop, leaving the window open. Relaunch the application and test. If there's no change, quit again and put the item you moved back where it was. Otherwise, delete the item you moved.
*If you don't see the contextual menu item, copy the selected text to the Clipboard (command-C). In the Finder, select
Go ▹ Go to Folder...
from the menu bar, paste into the box that opens (command-V). You won't see what you pasted because a line break is included. Press return.
Hello Linc:
Tried it twice. There was no change.
Thanks,
Joshua
Delete the following line from the vCard you posted earlier in this thread:
item1.X-ABADR:Israel
Then import the card. Do you see all the data?
Yes
What does it mean?
Joshua
It means that the card is corrupt. I don't know how that data got there. It might have been added by a third-party plugin. What I would do in your place is to remove all lines beginning with "item1" from the iCloud export in a text editor, and then import it.
I believe that is an Outlook code, I have seen it before. Were these cards ever in Outlook?
Hi:
It seems to me the problematic line is the one containing the X-ABADR:Israel which in some of the contacts begins with item2, item3, item3, item4, item5, item6
I'll try to remove all of them, however, since the bad data is also on the icloud contacts, how can I then force the icloud contacts to use the fixed contacts that I will have on my mac?
Joshua
When you change the contacts locally, the changes will propagate to iCloud.
Hello Linc:
So actually, since in iCloud the data shows correctly, it is a problem of Contact on the Mac that it is presenting the contacts with the bad card incorrectly. Perhpas we should alert Apple about this? What do you think?
Joshua
Dear Linc:
Before I get back to everyday chores, let me thank you from the bottom of my heart for waking this walk with me and guiding me to a solution to a problem that haunted me for a year. 🙂
I never used outlook (I'm somewaht alergic to MS products also because MS Office does not support Hebrew on the Mac) - but perhaps at some time in the past I accidentaly run it on my Mac.
Looking at contacts one by one now, it seems there were many more corrupted things, some contacts received emails and web sites that had nothing to do with them and some other contacts had their notes doubled, trippled and more.
Again, Many Thanks
Joshua
Dear Linc:
Unforutantley what happened was that the information from iCloud (which contained the corrupted data) overrode the information I manually repaired on my Mac. Now I am back to sqaure one -
Do you hava any idea how this can be prevented other than stopping icloud sync, deleting all my online contact, importing them from my mac and then restarting sync again?
Sincerely,
Joshua Margolin
Dear Linc:
If I follow the procedure that I suggested in my previous post, can I be sure that the copy of the contacts on my iPhone will not contaminate the copy of iCloud? which version is at the top of the food chain? I would have expected that it would be the Mac or that at least this can be set by the user.
What do you think?
Sincerely,
Joshua Margolin
I don't use iCloud so I'm not very familiar with it. I'm sure that if you delete all contacts from all devices, and from iCloud, then sync from your Mac, that the online version will be the same as what you uploaded. I can't be sure that iCloud itself isn't adding the problem data, but if it is, I don't understand why more people aren't reporting the same issue.
Shuka wrote:
Dear Linc:
If I follow the procedure that I suggested in my previous post, can I be sure that the copy of the contacts on my iPhone will not contaminate the copy of iCloud? which version is at the top of the food chain? I would have expected that it would be the Mac or that at least this can be set by the user.
The 'top of the foodchain' is iCloud.com (the website) all others are simply copies of it. There is no 'sync', your clients are signed into a remote server that serves data to them. When you enter data in a client it is sent to the server for inclusion in the dataset.
Your problems are so widespread that a solution needs to come from correcting the server (via iCloud.com) with all clients disconnected.
Back to basics in other words.
If you want to continue with this I will be online tomorrow, tonight does not have the time left.
Hi Linc:
Thanks for clearing this up. The problem was not in iCloud. Since I did not know that icloud reigns, I turned off synching, deleted all contacs on iCloud (which also deleted all contact on my iPhone) exported the fixed contacts to a vcf file on the Mac, then imported them to iCloud and only then turned syncing on again. Now everything is working as expected - thanks to you.
Another issue that I wanted to mention relates to the contact groups and smart groups. I do not know if you noticed, but smart groups do not show in the Mail application. The result is that the smart groups are reallly useless. What I do is create smart groups, then create anoter set of regular groups with identical names, enter the smart group, select all contacts, and drag them into the regular group with the appropriate name. These groups do appear in Mail but they are never uptodate as are my smartgroups. This really seems pointless. I have written Apple about this many years ago but they never did anything about it. What do you think?
Joshua
contacts on my Mac contain only part of the data I have on iCloud and the iPhone
