Why are they all not syncing?

Open contacts on your phone and tap Groups, then check each group to see if the missing iCloud contact belongs to a non-iCloud group such as On My iPhone, or a Gmail, Yahoo or exchange account group. If so, you'll need to recreate it in the iCloud account to get to into iCloud.

Open Contacts (Address Book) on your Mac and check your groups there too. See if you have contacts that belong to a non-iCloud group such as On My Mac. If so, drag and drop them into the iCloud group in order to add them to iCloud.

Sorry, I've been gone all day. Since not all the contacts from your Mac were added to iCloud, you might want to identify several that do not appear on icloud.com to see if they exceed the iCloud contact maximums as stated here: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4489. For example, do the have lots of text so they exceed 256KB in size, or do they contain pictures in a format that isn't supported.

The other thing you could try is to back up your contacts as a vCard (select all your contacts, then go to File>Export>Export vCard), then reimport them (by double-clicking the file you just exported), then clean up the duplicates (Card>Look for Duplicates, Merge Duplicates). This might add the missing ones to iCloud. Before doing this you should also create a contact archive (File>Export>Contacts Archive).

I am having a similar if not the exact same problem. My iCloud and Address Book contacts seem to be the same and do not include any new contacts in what seems to be the past 6 months, all new contacts would have been input from my iPhone. I have synced my phone in iTunes via a cord connection as well as backed up my phone to the cloud today (and several times to be sure), and the cloud and my Address Book do not update. I looked into the Groups troubleshooting, but I have only "All iCloud" under iCloud and "Contacts" under Exchange, both which are checked to sync. My iPhone has the contacts that I'm looking to back up, sync, etc. Also, my notes have never synced with the cloud (I have no idea where to find them on my Mac if they've synced through iTunes); I did recently (past week?) update the notes setting to backup to the cloud, which just confirms that my backups this week aren't working.

Some thoughts that may or may not lead to a solution...

-My phone was previous my husbands, and perhaps it is still linked to his cloud in some way? The phone shows up as a device in my iTunes, but the wifi sync setting on the phone says his name/the name of his device. Not sure if this is relevant.

-I am using a 4s and an older iOS on my phone, as I've been terrified of losing content (contacts and notes) because I can't figure out my cloud issues. I have a whiped and previously owned 5 that I'm hoping to use once I confirm the backup is proper done so the info can properly be restored.

-For a while my photos and photo stream were syncing through the cloud... I take (and kept) an obnoxious amount of photos on my phone, and I was constantly receiving messages that my iCloud was almost full (which I assume means it wasn't syncing properly) and that my phone storage was almost full. I have remedied the photo issue and all are safe on my Mac, and I now have several MBs of space in my cloud. But I am wondering if I screwed something up between the cloud and my phone in some way?

-My Mac also had a previous owner. If I had to guess, the sync that had the most up-to-date contacts would have happened either around the time that I was overwhelming my phone and/or iCloud storage or when I started up the Mac for the first time and established my iTunes on this computer.

Apologies for any incorrect terminology and if I've posted in an less-that-appropriate discussion feed... this is my first time in the Apple Support community. : )

Hi LDW504,

First, you need to make sure that when you have your device hooked up to iTunes, that the Info page does not show your Contacts being sync'd by iTunes. If it does, then you don't have all of your iCloud parts set up correctly.

Make sure that you have the Contacts option (and any other items you want to sync through the cloud) selected on all of your devices in iCloud: Settings>iCloud

On the Mac, make sure that your iCloud account is signed on, and that Contacts (and Notes or anything else you want to sync to the cloud) are turned on: System Preferences>iCloud

Basically, you may be syncing your Books, Apps, Music, Photos via iTunes, but if you want your Contacts, Notes, Documents, etc. to sync through iCloud then you have to set the iCloud settings up at both the device and the Mac level, and you have to make sure you don't have any conflicting settings for those specific items in the iTunes Device Profiles for your devices.

Hope this helps.

Cheers,

GB

Thank you for the response GB!

Turns out my missing contacts were in the separate Exchange group... I hadn't done enough investigating. I re-saved a contact into the iCloud group and after an iCloud backup the new contact was immediately in my Address Book and cloud. I have updated that to be my contact default group and now just have to manually change the 47 others...

To answer your helpful responses, my Info page in iTunes says that my "contacts are being synced with your iPhone over the air." I'm not 100% sure where to change these settings on my phone. But if it's Settings>General>iTunes Wi-Fi Sync, then my phone hasn't done this since Sept 2012 when I inherited the phone... it says "sync will resume when 'husbands-username' is available." For now, I'm assuming that this is not correct but not creating my problems.

Your second point is as it should be on my phone, whew!

To the third point... had no idea that dropdown existed. But it is in fact logged on with contacts selected. But Mail & Notes was not! Notes did not update after I checked them in system preferences... I'm a little unsure if, on my phone's Notes settings, they should be labeled as iCloud to backup? (They didn't backup when I tried this.) When they're default labeled as Gmail, I can access them by searching my email, so worst case scenario there's some copy and pasting... at the moment I know they are safe.

Thank you for your help!

LDW

Hi LDW,

Basically, anything you want to sync over iCloud needs to be checked in the iCloud settings on your devices and your Mac:

Mac - System Preferences>iCloud (which I think you have already checked)

Devices - Settings>iCloud: make sure that all of the items you want to sync via iCloud are checked here as well

If your iCloud settings are in sync (pun intended), then the sync via iCloud for all of your devices and your Mac should work. If they don't work initially, restart your Mac, and reset your devices: Hold down the Home and Power buttons at the same time and continue to hold them down until the Silver Apple appears (up to 30 seconds). Nothing will be lost, but the restart/reset may jumpstart the process.

Post back with any questions or further issues!

Cheers,

GB

Thanks andrewfromplano. Instant fix. Such a relief!!!