Address Book doesn't sync UP to iCloud, but syncs back down..

Question

(Sorry, Winston, and maybe Roger, I must be developing Alzheimer's ..I just cannot understand how this iCloud system works..)
I've searched through hundreds of queries and answers, but cannot find a similar problem ..but maybe I simply haven't looked hard enough.
Question on behalf of my good lady ..and I've been tearing my hair out over this for WEEKS..
She has 3502 contacts in her Address Book on her OS X Lion 10.7.4 MacBook Air. She has two iPhones. They're both running iOS 5.1.1. She has enabled iCloud on ALL these three devices, using her @me.com identity and appropriate password.
She updates Address Book contacts ONLY on her MBA - for sync'ing to her phones - and she does NOT update any Contacts info on her phones in order to have them transferred BACK to her Mac. That's how she prefers to work.
The only way that her Address Book contacts will sync UP to iCloud from the Mac appears to be to select 'All on My Mac' within Address Book, and to Export as vcards to a file on her Mac, and then, in the online iCloud Contacts webpage, to Import that file of vcards. All well and good, but that seems to ignore all her various Groups; everything ends up bundled all into one group. (Perhaps each Group in her Mac's Address Book needs to be separately Exported and then Imported, but surely it shouldn't be as long-winded as that.)
(About 402 of these contacts are not accepted by the online iCloud Contacts, although they seem to fall within the requirements of not being too many, not being too large, etc. But that's a separate problem which I'm still investigating ..maybe the names are formatted incorrectly; I'll keep working on that separately..)
Anyhow: by explicitly Importing all those Address Book contacts into the iCloud Contacts, they then immediately start to get distributed - correctly! - to her iPhones ..but also back into the Address Book on her Mac, thereby DUPLICATING them all in Address Book! (They CAN be seen as SINGLE entries by choosing 'All iCloud'.)
I cannot understand the opaque instructions in all of the iCloud documentation. NONE of the documentation which I've studiously read (online, in System Prefs, in every Help file I can find) seems to indicate a DIRECTION for this iCloud sync'ing.
WHERE - if there is such a place - does one specify that contacts should go only UP FROM the Mac, and not BACK DOWN to the Mac?
There seem to be options only to turn ON sync'ing (or off), but not the DIRECTION of sync'ing, or which device(s) take precedence. (..In iTunes - when sync'ing phones to a Mac with a cable - there's a preference to over-write EITHER the host Mac with data FROM a phone, or to over-write an iPhone's data with data FROM the Mac..)
So I'm asking..
(a) Can one specify a DIRECTION when turning on sync'ing for a device?
(b) With iCloud sync'ing turned ON on a Mac, is there any known reason why Address Book contacts should not send themselves UP to the iCould, instead of having to be manually Imported?
(c) Does one Export Groups individually? ..But what if a name is in more than one Group ..does it get duplicated online in iCloud?
(d) Is there not the intelligence within the iCloud facility for the system to NOT distribute back, or duplicate, contacts to the device which is the SOURCE of those contacts? Should it not do a comparison between iCloud and a device, and then recognise that those contacts already exist on the remote device, and therefore NOT distribute them BACK again to the SOURCE? (..Or am I having too high expectations?..)
Many thanks in anticipation, and I'm so sorry to be such a nuisance if this has already been answered a zillion times before.
(Yes, Winston; she has almost as many iPhones as you have AppleTVs!)
All best wishes,
David.

Answer 1

David, nice to hear from you again, hope you are well.
This user tip might help you understand how accounts work with Address Book.
I believe you have duplicates because you have two sets of contacts. "iCloud" and "On My Mac". Once you have created all your contacts in the iCloud account, you should delete them from On My Mac.
You can move contacts simply by dragging and dropping from one account to the other, you don't need to export them all to the desktop (although doind so will serve as a good back up if all goes wrong). You should note that this copies them though rather than simply move them, so you'll need to delete the old set when you are done.
As for preserving groups from the On My Mac Account, you can't but you can simplify recreating them by copying contacts (drag and drop) from an on my mac group to an empty group in iCloud.
Not sure about the contacts that you are struggling to move.
Many aspects of iCloud are difficult to understand, have a mull through what I've said so far and come back if everything still doesn't fall into place.