Duplicate contacts after upgrading?

Question

Duplicate contacts after upgrading?

I started from

a Mac Power Book running Snow Leopard - too old to upgrade to Mountain Lion and afirst generation iPad

Not at all sure how either of those worked wo\ith iCloud

I switched to a MacMini on Mountain Lion and also from an iPhine 4 to an iPhine 5

So I sort of stumbled into iCloud before and after my upgrade

Now I have duplicates in my Contacts on my MacMini, my iphone 5 and my iPad but not yet on my Power book

my iCloud account for Mail on the iPad is empty

My calendar on the iPad has dupplicates. One has 158 duplicates

Obviously I screwed up in my transition if it before and since

I guess I have two problems

First to stop any more havoc probably by cleaning up settings for iCloud and on each device

Second to remove duplicates especially from Contacts deleting one at a time is tough when there over 100 dups

Mac mini, OS X Mountain Lion (10.8.5)

Posted on Oct 24, 2013 2:29 PM

Reply

Answer 1

Best reply

randers4

Level 9

63,519 points

Oct 24, 2013 2:51 PM in response to Don Hutchinson1

If the contacts are correct and unduplicated on your PowerBook, export them to a vCard by opening Address Book, select All Contacts on the left sidebar, click on a single contact, the press Command-A to select all contacts (they should all be highlighted), then go to File>Export>Export vCard and save it on your desktop.

Then delete all of your contacts on icloud.com (which will delete them from your other devices too.* Go to icloud.com, open Contacts. click on All Contacts on the left, to the right click on any single contact to select it, click on the Actions (gear shaped) icon at the bottom and choose Select All, then press the Delete key on your keyboard.

Then email the vCard you created earlier from your PowerBook to yourself. Open the email on your iPhone and tap the attachment to import the contacts to your iPhone, as well as to iCloud and your other devices.

* If you want, you can make a precautionary backup of the duplicated contacts as they are now before starting. To do this, open Contacts on your Mac Mini, select all contacts, export them as a vCard and save it on your desktop.

Reply

Answer 2

Oct 25, 2013 1:39 PM in response to randers4

I was able to create the vcard copy on my PowerBook. but ran into trouble with emailing The file is 1.1 MB and I presumed that Verizon (my SP) has an upper limit. So I tried my web hosting site (GoDaddy)with a 20 MB limit

That also failed but stated that my mailbox was full, I sent a test messge which sailed through

I split the filinto smaller sections. Only when I got the file down to 8 KB did it work oin Verizon 74KB did not

Not sure where this leaves me!

Can I export and import the vcard files over my USB network? or FTP them through GoDaddy?

Reply

Answer 3

randers4

Level 9

63,519 points

Oct 25, 2013 1:34 PM in response to Don Hutchinson1

If you spit your contacts into multiple vCards, each containing a subset of your contacts, you should be able to open each email on your phone, then tap the attachment to import the contacts. Try this for one of them to confirm that the contacts were successfully added to your phone, and to your other devices via iCloud. If so, repeat for the other vCards.

Reply

Answer 4

Oct 25, 2013 2:47 PM in response to randers4

If 74 KB won't got through, then even if 50KB passes , then it will take 22 iterations to transfer 1.2 GB

Something doesn't compute here. Is this very raw formatted data?

Reply

Answer 5

randers4

Level 9

63,519 points

Oct 25, 2013 2:55 PM in response to Don Hutchinson1

Something doesn't sound right if you can't email a 1.1MB attachment. Do you have an iCloud email address? If not, you can create one by going to Settings>iCloud and turning Mail on. Then add the account to your PowerBook with these settings: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4864 and send the vCard to yourself using your iCloud email account.

Reply

Answer 6

Oct 25, 2013 3:37 PM in response to randers4

This solved my problem. Thanks for the help and your patience in staying with me

Reply

Answer 7

randers4

Level 9

63,519 points

Oct 25, 2013 3:39 PM in response to Don Hutchinson1

You're welcome. Glad I could help.

Reply