iCloud Contacts failing to sync after High Sierra

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.

***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!

😮

I deleted everything in ~/Library/Containers that had addressbook in the name. I still have a contact that I created on the iPhone, complete with a picture, that will not sync to my MacBook. I can see it in iCloud.com.

So I deleted the contact that I created on my iPhone that wasn't syncing to Contacts on my Mac, recreated it on the Mac, and now I find that it is not syncing to my iPhone. The fact that contact syncing is unreliable really undermines this platform in a serious way.

Thanks for the tip but alas it's not working for me. I tried deleting anything with 'addressbook' in the name in ~/Library/Containers and rebooting, to no avail.

My iPhone (running iOS11), my other Mac (running Sierra), and the address book in iCloud.com are perfectly in sync but my new Mac running High Sierra simply won't sync contacts. I can see the AddressBookSourceSync process running in the background and transferring data but none of the changes I've made to my address book since upgrading have made it into the new Mac.

Epic Fail

This is exactly the behavior I see. Contacts sync is broken on macOS, probably due to new changes in CloudKit.

For now, while working on macOS, I enter any new contacts or changes through the browser to my appleID login at www.icloud.com

The solutions listed (deleting ‘addressbook’ files and starting over) only work for the first sync. Groups do not sync at all, ever; contacts never sync after the first instance. Incredibly frustrating.

I filed a bug under 35241894

It seems the possible solution from dianeoforegon is both involved, and runs risk of losing all of one's contacts. Would prefer a real solution from Apple at this stage. Many people reporting the same issue.

It’s only related to new contacts or when you change the picture on existing contacts after the upgrade to High Sierra. Prior contacts as they are do not seem to be affected. I can recreate this repeatedly and have done so with Apple engineering. Once a picture is put into a contact or changed the update to iCloud fails. Take the picture away and it works.

Thank Rob,

I have just tested the sync issue between my iPhone (OS10.*) and MBP 2015 (with High Sierra 10.13.1) and found that the issue exists. In my case, when I enter a new contact to MBP, the name occurs in my iPhone (through iCloud) right after the action, but when I put a new contact into the iPhone, the name did not appear in MBP. I have tried to follow instruction of people reply to your this message, but nothing improved.

In the past (before updating to High Sierra I worked on macOS Sierra 10.12.4-6) I did not face this problem.

Regards,

The problem is still the same.

Deleting some containers or caches will only solve the problem for a moment, the sync to iCloud still does not work properly.

This is clearly a very annoying bug that is also not solved with 10.13.1.

For those of you that the solution of deleting items in Containers didn't work, I had an Apple support person have me log out of iCloud on my MacBook Pro, move my Keychains folder to my desktop, and restart which solved my issue. My Keychains folder rebuilt itself and the tech suggested I keep the 'old' folder we removed on my desktop in the event I had to reference any old passwords. So far I haven't had to. I apologize if this isn't too detailed but all this was done over the phone after a period of 30 minutes until a senior software engineer helped out after a lot of troubleshooting. Hope this helps.

I'm having this problem too. Any contacts added on Macbook Pro in Contacts App aren't synced to iCloud.com, iPhone 7 or iPad Pro. All are running latest OS versions. None of the contacts added have photos attached. Bizarrely adding a Group syncs instantly, but then adding the contacts to it works on Mac but not on iCloud etc. Then deleting the group on Mac doesn't delete it from iCloud. Adding a contact on iCloud syncs to iOS devices but not to Mac.

It's been happening to me definitely since 10th Nov as that's when I added a small batch (5 contacts) and created the group. I then used it to send an email with no problem but noticed today that the group hadn't synced to my iPad.

I am experiencing this issue to. My iPhone X synchronizes with the Safari accessed Contacts in iCloud, however the Contacts app on my 2015 MacBook Pro running High Sierra 10.13.1 does not sync. Need Apple to fix this bug!