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Duplicate Contacts

Avatar Trevor Hewson
I’m sure this is an old chestnut but it’s the first time it’s afflicted me. All my contacts suddenly have duplicated. They are duplicated in iCloud.com and this is faithfully reflected on all devices.

This caused a problem yesterday when, in the car, I asked Siri to share my ETA with Mary. Siri responded with “Which Mary Hewson? Mary Hewson or Mary Hewson?” As you can imagine, answering “Mary Hewson” just provoked a repeat of the same response!

I had a quick search and found a page which dealt with duplicates on the Mac only but said that if contacts were duplicated on iCloud.com, I should contact Apple Support, so I thought I’d start here!

Re: Duplicate Contacts

Avatar Drew McFarlane
Contacts > Card > Look for duplicates.

Sometimes it works Trevor (not always) It is a pain in the backside.

Re: Duplicate Contacts

Avatar Tony Still
I've only seen duplication caused by a local copy plus an iCloud copy. I presume that you're sure this isn't what's happened.

Aren't you lucky having two Marys.

Re: Duplicate Contacts

Avatar Trevor Hewson
Ok, the Look for Duplicates facility in Contacts claimed to find 344 duplicates, then crashed Contacts when trying to merge them. The second time it claimed to have done the job but I was still left with most contacts duplicated and all my contact groups also duplicated.

I next unticked Contacts in iCloud Preferences on the Mac. This seems to have left me with a single set of contacts on iCloud which I can see on my phone and iPad, and a single set of contacts on the iMac which presumably are now local only to the Mac. So it looks like it may be the situation Tony described - presumably some aberration caused the Mac to add all its contacts to iCloud a second time?

I think I now need to work out how to tell the Mac to forget about its local contacts and sync to those in iCloud. any ideas?

P.S. I daren't respond to your last remark here Tony!

Re: Duplicate Contacts

Avatar Tony Still
From memory, when I had this problem I turned off iCloud Contacts on the Mac (in Contacts' Preferences), deleted everything that was left and then re-enabled iCloud Contacts.

I'd first cherry-pick any recent changes or additions and manually ensure that they match in the supposed duplicates.

As long as you have another device using iCloud Contacts, they will not be affected by turning them off on the Mac. I would also take the precaution of backing-up the Contacts on the Mac first, to my knowledge the best way to do this is to export a Contacts Archive (File menu).

Re: Duplicate Contacts

Avatar Trevor Hewson
Thanks Tony, I’ll take a brave pill and have a go!

Re: Duplicate Contacts

Avatar Trevor Hewson
Okay. Deleting all contacts from the Mac left me with no contacts and no groups, as expected. Contacts on my iPad were still there. So far, so good.

Re-enabling Contacts in iCloud restored the contacts - and no duplicates. However all of the groups were also restored - in triplicate! Interestingly two copies of each group were populated but the third copy was empty. I manually deleted all the duplicate groups (taking care to leave one of the populated ones!) and, for the moment at least, all is well. Fingers crossed it stays that way.

Thanks for your help.
 
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