Address Book Duplicates/ A Mess

Every contact in my address book that is in a smart group now has double entries for each contact. And the regular groups are doubled and a mess. Sync may have done this. I have a backup of my system, where would I find and what I should copy over?
I tried the look for duplicates function, but it did not fix it.
Paul

Do you mean each Contact has double-entries in the All group? Or do you mean the contacts appear in multiple Smart Groups as well as the All group?
You can restore a previously backed-up Address Book by using the built-in "*Revert to Address Book backup...*" function on the file menu.
Before you start doing anything though I would suggest backup your current messed-up Contacts using the same backup function.
You can also try exporting the All group as a vCard, deleting all your Contacts and smart groups, re-import the vCard and start over. It should notify you on import of duplicates.

Similar Messages

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    With AB open and active, click TM in the dock to enter it. Go back in the timeline until the addresses you are looking for appear in AB. Select all addresses you need and click restore. You will be asked then to import the addresses into AB.
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  • Lion - Address Book Duplicates

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    --russell wrote:
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    I so identify with anyone who has this problem of having address book duplicates.  Took me at least five tries to get it right!!!!
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    Hi guys,
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    Can someone please tell me how I can remove this account from my Address Book as it's driving me mad, I dont want it anymore and it also means that I now have a duplicate Birthdays account in my iCal as well!!!
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    <Edited By Host>

  • Gmail google cal Spanning Sync MobileMe Contact Address Book = What a mess

    Hi,
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    What a mess!
    I now have over two thousand contacts, hundreds of duplicates, hundreds of empty cards, dozens of names without any information whatsoever.
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    Anyone else have this problem?
    How are you solving it?
    Or do you have an altogether different system for consolidating google calendar , contacts and iphone!
    HEEELP
    Thanks

    Do you mean each Contact has double-entries in the All group? Or do you mean the contacts appear in multiple Smart Groups as well as the All group?
    You can restore a previously backed-up Address Book by using the built-in "*Revert to Address Book backup...*" function on the file menu.
    Before you start doing anything though I would suggest backup your current messed-up Contacts using the same backup function.
    You can also try exporting the All group as a vCard, deleting all your Contacts and smart groups, re-import the vCard and start over. It should notify you on import of duplicates.

  • Address Book duplicates, what is duplicated

    I have finally cleaned up Address Book after a near disaster with Outlook 2011 for the Mac.  I sync with Google Apps and have no duplicates there.  I now find after a few days I have 2 duplicates in Address Book but not in Google Contacts.  Before I merge these duplicates, is there a way to see what is duplicated and which records have duplicate datad?
    PS, Before anyone begins to use Outlook for the Mac, they should backup their Address Book. File>Export>Address Book Achive will do this.  Time Machine is another option.  I also foud that Outlook makes a mess of notes in a Contact record.  I nolonger usse Outlook.

    Here is a possibility to consider.
    Open Contacts and select the first contact then scroll to the last contact and hold down the shift key and select it. At least for me, the Select All command does not work but the above method should select (highlight) all of your contacts.
    Then open Numbers. Do a Command Tab so that the Contacts window is visible above the Numbers window. Click and drag the contacts onto the Numbers window.
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  • Address book duplicates icloud

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    Turns out that when I had been going through the Adress Book on the MB Air trying to eliminate some of the duplicates I had chosen --without even knowing it or realzing it-- the card that I guess sync with my iPhone. It was gone. Sure enough, when I got back and looked it up on the MB Air it was still there not syncing to my iPhone. So it seems that since I actually paid to subscribe to Mobile Me then iCloud one of the benefits was that all the time I spent manually removing duplicates meant that I wouldn't have the contact info when I most needed it. It's great when you can get someone to actually pay for that kind of service.
    So tyring to be diligient I used Address Book / Card / Look for Duplicates ... all the Duplicates still there.
    Then I followed the Help suggesting and pressed Control / select to highlight two duplicate cards and even though the First / Last / Company / phone numbers / etc. are all the same I get the message: "The cards could not be merged because they came from different accounts."
    I have checked with guys from the office who have the exact same problem with no idea how to solve the problem. Is it that in order to use Address Book on both an iPhone and an OS X machine you've just got to be smarter, more sophisticated, more IT oriented? Or you have to go to 3rd party software?
    Seems like a pretty easy thing not to be struggling with. Ok, I admit I'm naive but it seems pretty basic to me. If I have an Address Book it should synchronize between OX X and IOS.

  • Address Book duplicates

    Each time I restart Address Book seems to be duplicating <Apple> address. At one time there were over 7,000 exact duplicates of Apple Computer Inc. What am I doing wrong?

    bneely, it worked, thank you.
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  • CLEANING UP Address Book Duplicates and Errors

    *I'm looking for a way to clean up duplicates in Address Book.* The built-in solution doesn't seem to work
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    The built-in solution doesn't seem to work.
    Not very helpful, that. Provide details and maybe someone will pop in with a solution.

  • How to resolve address book duplicates

    between my desk top and my ipod touch and icloud i have many multiples in my address book.  how caqn i undo this clutter?

    Contacts – Resolve Duplicates
    Contacts – Resolve Duplicates

  • Identifying Address Book Duplicates

    Does anyone know of a way to see which contacts are duplicated in the Address Book? The built-in function shows the number of duplicate contacts with an option only to merge the cards; however, I would like to, actually, see which contacts are duplicates before I would do this.
    Is there software or, perhaps, an Apple script available that one knows of?
    Thanks.

    I also have the same question.  I sync my Address Book with Google Contacts (I use Google Apps and also sync iCal with my Google Calendar - this works OK).  I have merged and/or corrected all duplicate in Google Contacts using the Find and Merge Duplicates tool (More>Find & Merge Duplcates.  I have no duplicates in Google Contacts, but I find I have several duplicates in Address Book when I use the Look for Duplicates tool under the Card menu.  However, I am not told which cards are duplicates.  Before I merge these I need to know what these duplicates are.  For example, I have 2 Joe Smiths who are different people and do not want to merge them.

  • Address Book Duplicate Entries

    When I opened my idisk address book, all my entries are duplicated - 200 each in their twice. Is there an easy way to remove these duplicate entries. When I look at my address book on my laptop, their are no duplicates.

    Welcome to Apple Discussions.
    This is actually a . Mac Sync issue, for which there is a forum located here.
    To correct the problem, you should temporarily disable .Mac synchronization by changing your interval to Manually, then open the System Preferences application, press the .Mac pane, then the Advanced tab. Wait for the list of devices to refresh, then press the Reset Sync Data… button in the lower left corner.
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  • Delete Address Book Duplicates with less info?

    I was wondering how you would go about deleting duplicate contacts in Address Book 4.0.3? I want to keep the contacts I have which contain at least the "Company" field filled in (contacts with more info) but then delete the ones with less. If a bunch of vCards have the same name but different email addresses will will they merge into only one vCard (by default I think another program put multiple emails with the same name and when I merged vCards there was only one email address for that name)? Should I merge the ones I don't want?
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    They also sometimes appear with a dash or minus sign infront of them.

  • Address book duplicates, address book duplicates

    My Address book is duplicating contacts. It will not search. I cannot merge duplicates as it freezes/hangs on the merging sequence. What to do? I have Mac OS X Lion Version 10.7.2 with a 2.8 GHz Intel Core i5 Processor and 16 GB  1333 MHz DDR3, my Graphics ATI Rdeon HD 5750 1024 MB.

    You have duplicates because you are using two accounts that have the same information in them. You need to eliminate one of the accounts and then check again. If you still need help then navigate to the iCloud on my Mac forum and someone can provide more insight on how to fix the issue.

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