iCloud Contacts NOT Syncing with MAC - FIX

Like many, I've spent hours on the phone with Senior support, to no avail. I have tried many versions of what all of you have tried, and it still doesn't work. My MB Air works perfectly, syncing with iCloud and the iOS devices, but the iMac is out in the cold, and it doesn't sync with anything. Contacts added on any device other than the iMac are synced, and some have pics.

I still have one senior support that is really trying to find a solution to this; let's hope it happens!

I have had similar issues and applied the fix recommended by ashr1uk. After completing this task my contacts in iCloud matched those on my iPhone and those on my iPad. However these contacts did not populate into Contacts on my iMac. I copied all contacts from iCloud to my iMac. I then created a new contact in my iCloud account, then on my iPad and then on my iPhone and each time the new contact populated across all devices, but not onto my iMac. I then created a new contact on my iMac, but this did not populate into my iCloud account, iPhone nor iPad. So to me this problem still exists - unless there has been a new fix which I can't find in the discussion forums.

This last post by Brian Yip has worked for 2 days for me. I've tried adding contacts from various devices, as well as photos to the contacts, birthdays, and all is syncing the way that it should. I only deleted the listed files from my iMac, as the Air did not have a problem syncing.

Thanks Brian!

Thank you. This worked.

I didn't read comments before but it is true that all contact photos will be gone.

Also I noticed that in my MacBook contacts the column on the most left hand side that shows smart groups etc, previously I had smart groups, iCloud and another group for local contacts. After doing this local one is not there anymore.

So I think on MacBook I probably had local contacts before I linked my MacBook to iCloud and maybe that messed up the link between the two - but I am just speculating here.

MANY THANKS TO THE ORIGINAL POSTER. YOU ARE A LIFE SAVER!!

Cheers, somehow only deleting the contacts on my Mac, started syncing again.. but I didn't know ! and still ended up deleting all my iCloud contacts.

it did fix it, but as lots of other people said, the contact pictures are gone. hehe

cheers

Well, I hit "Send" too soon on that one.

Here's what I did after losing my contact pictures and what seems to work. For me. For now.

1. Delete the contacts again from icloud.com

2. Wait for contacts to disappear from Mac, iPhone, iPad

3. Reboot all devices

4. Got to Settings on icloud.com and scroll down to the bottom of the page

5. Down there you'll find a link "restore contacts" (roughly translated, my iCloud is set to German)

6. Choose a backup from a couple of hours/days ago. Important: don't choose one of the backups that were automatically created, while you were trying to fix the problem

7. This may take a while (in my case with about 1000 contacts about 5 minutes)

8. In case you receive an error message (which I did) and end up with a partial restore (which I did): start over. For me it worked on the third attempt.

Did this solve the problem. Hard to say. All of my contacts are the same on all devices now. Changes are being synced across all devices, even those that were made on the Mac. However, it has only be a few hours since I came up with this solution and it might very well be that all goes back to sh*t by tomorrow. But for now …

Dang i just do not get it, I did the export and followed the instructions above and re-imported to iCloud, up imported fine, and everything updated and shows in my iPhone but now my "All on my Mac" folder is empty". what am I doing wrong? Glad I did the export so I did not lose my data

This wasn't the fix for me. What was happening is that my antivirus blocked the service from mac to phone. Pita! Once I turned off two parts of the virus program, I was able to have everything syncing perfectly. Support said that with the last two High Sierra updates, they added a virus protection to the OSX. Would have been nice to know beforehand.

Had a similar issue and started reviewing these steps. After logging into iCloud.com on my Mac, and viewing the contacts, there was a Refresh option. Clicked it since a recent contact was not listed and wah-lah - the known missing contact appeared in the iCloud and on my iPhone.

I did this. I thought I had read all the comments and understood that the photos would be missing from my contacts. I did not see (until later) that all groups would be empty. That's a pretty major thing for me. If you can, you should modify the original post to indicate that this is a problem. Had I known, I could at least have printed out lists of contacts within groups. I can't think of any way to restore this.

Hi there,

any news about your issue from the last update?

I'm having same problem, so far spent an hours with Apple Support like you with no success, up to the point of reinstalling macOS which apparently didn't help either.

I didn't sign out / in from my iCloud (basically because it's quite a lot of hassle and breaks up also many other things), also I didn't try to delete any files from my ~/Library folder regarding AddressBook, Preferences, plists, etc. like some guys advice here on Apple Support Communities. I don't wanna make a mess in my system's integrity also I believe if you delete something outside the Contacts app it's database might get corrupted maybe more than it is.

Today I expect phone call from Apple Support, they wanna escalate my problem, and let's see if they can help today. Anyway it's quite odd that I see so many people having this exactly same issue with Contacts on Mac and it still doesn't get proper fix from Apple. For me I have this issue on brand-new MacBook Pro with clean installation of macOS which is of course updated to the latest version. I simply didn't have time to mess something up everything on my system is pretty much on defaults so far.

Your solution seem pretty clean and straightforward, if I'm not successful with Apple Support today, I'll give it a try.

My advice is to not follow that solution unless you are prepared to rebuild any contact groups that you have. Until Apple comes up with a fix, use the contacts in your iOS devices and in iCloud where everything else seems to be synced properly.

Ed

how is the antivirus modified??? I believe this is my solution, as i have many updates on my mac address book, which have not been updated to cloud -- and doing the swap ONLY updates mac from teh cloud -- no way to push the mac to cloud...if that makes sense?

So glad I read the comments first. While this solution apparently works, it was too much trouble, not to mention losing the pictures, so I did not try it. However, when I ran across Brian Yip's solution in the comments, I tried that and it worked perfectly. Thank you!

Tom Kenney, this one threw me off for a minute as well. They are not in the main library, but in the user library, which is hidden. To find it, be in the finder, hold down the [Option] key while clicking on the "Go" menu, and select "Library", which will now show up in the list. Now you should be able to find all of the mentioned folders.