iCloud Contacts failing to sync after High Sierra

Okay I tried this and it worked in terms of pulling down all my contacts from iCloud again. Unfortunately then making an edit to a card on my phone did not sync to the Mac. Likewise making an edit to a card on the Mac did not sync to iCloud or the Phone.

As usual though, the change on my iPhone did sync to iCloud.com just not to the Mac. So while I applaud this attempt, it's not a fix.

Fixing Address iCloud Sync Issue

***Problem Resolved***

I spoke with an Apple Senior Tech Advisor this morning and they were able to resolve the contact issue. Here are the steps the must be taken in the exact order for this to work.

1. Go to iCloud.com and export all your contacts to a safe file, just in case.

2. Turn off iCloud contacts in MacBook preferences so no longer connected to cloud

3. Make sure the MacBook Contacts are empty with zero contacts.

4. Restart computer and reopen contacts to make sure there are zero contacts.

5. open ~/Library/Containers and delete everything with addressbook in its name

6. open ~/Library/Application Support and delete everything with addressbook in its name

7. open ~/Library/Preferences and delete everything with addressbook in its name

8. open ~/Library/Caches and delete everything with addressbook in its name

9. Restart computer (this will restore OS operating files and folders for contacts, but not any contacts)

10. Go to preferences and check the iCloud contacts to update to contact folder.

A few other people have pointed this process out; however, Apple recommends removing contacts then restart and then empty the folders, containers, and preferences... then restarting again.

What is happening is there is an old copy of the contacts that the computer is populating instead of the new contact data feed.

This worked on my MacBook Pro and Desktop.

I'm with the "Delete Picture Group" (there seems to be a bunch, now - bryan, sazza, alien, reinier, etc...).

For me, I did NOT want to take on the "highly involved / delete files" activities. (Reinier's word is "rigorous" - that's a good description!)

Instead, I simply removed ALL pic's - immediate success. It's been quite a while; many new contacts added; immediate synch of new records (OK: it takes about 5 - 10 seconds). No relapses. Still going strong; like Donkey Kong (singing The Immigrant Song).

I reported on this last week - but, I also added a comment about some "bad (?)" contact entries. The further I go along, I'm starting to think it's exclusively related to the pic's - at least that's what has worked for me.

BTW, as I noted, before, I thought I only had a few pic's (maybe 8 - 10?); when I actually went through each record, there were 10's of pics (!?!) - not hundreds, but close. I don't know how they got in there...

Last thought: I REALLY like Macster's suggestion. If the "delete pic's" starts to fail, I'll give his option a whirl. Since his solution does not involve any "delete files", I'll feel much safer!

Good luck!

Matt

Set up iCloud Contacts

When you turn on iCloud Contacts, all of the information stored on separate devices uploads to iCloud. If you turn off iCloud Contacts, your information won't automatically move from iCloud back to your device.

On your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch

1. Go to Settings > [your name] > iCloud. If you’re using iOS 10.2 or earlier, go to Settings > iCloud.
2. Turn on Contacts.
3. When you're asked if you want to Merge or Cancel, tap Merge.

All of the information stored in Contacts uploads to iCloud.

On your Mac

1. From the navigation menu at the top of your computer screen, choose Apple menu () > System Preferences.
2. Click iCloud.
3. Select Contacts. You won't be asked if you want to merge.

All of the information stored in Contacts uploads to iCloud.

You have to close and then reopen Contacts on your Mac.

I know this is hugely frustrating, but one of the reasons I feel the issue had to do with the images attached to contacts is that in my case I was starting with a brand new Mac that came with HS and just set it up for the first time last week. I did not migrate any of my old anything, as I wanted it completely free and fresh. I rarely if ever mess about with images in contacts, but during the set up, I went to Airdrop one text document from my old Mac in the same room and when it saw my new Mac it had an image of my face. I never put that there, and the Macs are both "named" as the company with the exact same User Name. So I discovered that the new HS is "thinking for you" with Contacts and Mail in the sense that it saw my Contact for me, and of course my work phone and address (the "company") matched and it decided on its own that my new office Mac should have my face!

So, I went into Contacts and removed that image from the "company" and replaced it with one of the company building. A few hours later I discovered that info I had changed after that in contacts was not clouded to my contacts at home or on devices. In my case, this was a fast lucky immediate discovery, not weeks or months later.

As soon as I found these posts here saying remove any image you added, I did and boom! my Contacts were again syncing and have never reverted back again. Its been well over a week.

I'm saying all this as a person with a bug free, new fresh Mac running HS, who saw the behavior within a few hours of starting to work on the new Mac, so there were no 3rd party apps, malware or any other weird thing that could be blamed. I hadn't even set email up yet. I just got thru doing that yesterday....

Hope this helps!

This kind of worked, in that I had way more entries on my old Mac (my iMac just died so I'm using a backup computer until I can replace the dead SSD) than in the cloud. Now they are apparently sync'ed.

What started this troubleshooting, is that "my card" could not be edited or updated. If I tried to complete it (and only my email address was in the entire entry), the changes were not saved. After doing these steps and waiting a few minutes for sync I found my original entry and made it "my card" again in the Contacts app. Now it's showing rightly on my Mac and on iOS things.

Now maybe Safari auto-fill will work...

OH one more thing: I changed the little icon for my MacOS user account earlier today in system prefs, maybe that had something to do with it seeing how others are reporting problems with images in a contact.

Most likely you are looking in the wrong Library. There are 3 library folders. You need to look in your User's Library.

Macintosh HD Root folders

Applications

Library

System > Library

Users > Library

Show User's Library

The User's Library folder is hidden by default. To unhide:

Option 1) Select the Finder in the Dock. Under Go in the Menu bar > hold down the Option key and you’ll see the Library.

Option 2) You can also select the Home folder in the sidebar of a Finder window.

Pull down the “View” menu and select “Show View Options”

Check the box for “Show Library Folder”

***If nothing else has worked for you, this will***

After more than a year and a dozen tech support calls and following every lead on this forum I finally figured it out. It's a single contact. One single corrupt contact. It's the only thing that ever made sense. How do you find this contact? you're going to need help from Tech support. You have to run the log capture thing. Ask them what it is. They send you this DMG that is supposed to capture a bunch of hidden log files and email it to them. That's not the solution but it changes particular permissions on your computer that reveal a folder that was otherwise hidden.

The folder is ~/library/logs/contacts/CardDAV

Now if you see a folder in there called "Parsing Errors" you've struck gold.

1. Don't open that file. Duplicate it (cmd+d).
2. Change the file extension from .vcf to .xml so you can read it in a normal text editor.
3. Just open that file and inside you'll see the name of the culprit.
4. Find out which one of your devices contains this contact and delete it. (obviously copy the contact information down or something)

This contact did not appear in icloud (apparently icloud can reject the bad card without stopping the sync, but my macbook and macbook pro could not). The contact was only present and intact on my iphone. I deleted the card and poof! The pipes unclogged. I resynced and within seconds everything I'd been missing reappeared on all devices!

😮

It just occurred to me that it might be the CardDAV folder that you are referring to. If you read the directions, you have to run a DMG from tech support to get this folder. You did speak to tech support to get that DMG file, right? If not, go back and read the directions carefully and follow that up with a call to tech support. And let us know if that DID work for you!

I have been looking for a proper solution for this iCloud <-> OSX Contacts syncing problem for months. At first it seemed that deleting a bunch of files on OSX helped, but at the end, the problem of of not syncing was still there. (In the mean time, syncing between iCloud, iPhone and iPad just worked fine).

After digging and reading some more, I found out about the OSX Console application that is there to view application messages, warnings and errors in real time. It was clear that the process "AddressBookSourceSync" had a problem and the syncing process was aborted because of two specific Contact Cards. By default, privacy sensitive information is no longer logged, so at first, there is no clue as to which cards are causing the problem. After switching off this 'privacy' feature (you have to use Terminal to do that), it was clear which two cards caused the problem. I exported the card information from iCloud and then deleted these contacts on OSX. Immediately after that, the synchronisation started working again (verify by making changes both on OSX and on icloud.com).

Apple should add some UI for this situation and notify the OSX user about the inability to complete the iCloud sync because of specific cards. I can only guess at what the real underlying problem is. In my opinion, it has something to do with the pictures that you can assign to a contact.

regards,

Peter

I don't have any of these folders... help!

i think i found solution

iphone x

ios 11.4.1

go to

settings

contacts

default account

(change to icloud or another option)