Address book duplication

I hope someone can help me. I have updated my imac and my ios devices for the icloud. The calendar is working great. The problem I am having is that my address book had been duplicated. Everyone of my contacts are in twice (only on my imac). All my other devices are singular entries. Any thoughts on this?

Ok, so I thought I had fixed this problem, guess not. I have updated my os to 10.7.2 and installed the ios5 on my ios devices. The ios devises and icloud are working great. My problems is with the address book and it has duplicated all my cards so I have twice as many contacts now. In addition, I have additional blank birthdays on my calendar. I use to have Mobile Me and I turned that off. I did try and turn off icloud and delete everything in my address book and then re-started icould address. It worked to eliminate the duplicated cards for about 5 minutes. Then came the blank birthday events on my calendar. Any ideas?

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ICloud Address Book Duplication and Calendar Not Syncing

Hi guys,
I recently upgraded to iCloud despite the number of issues I read about on these forums. My initial reaction was a positive one but now I have two things I am struggling to work out:
My Address Book's search function completely froze up, meaning I couldn't type in the name of the person and they came up. I solved this by deleting an Address Book file in the Library as per a post on these forums. However now when I turned iCloud back on I have ALL of my contacts TWICE. The worst part is that merging them does not work as the system says they are coming for two different sources. Any suggestions? They only list ONCE on the iPhone.
My Calendar is not syncing from iCloud onto my iPhone. I update the Calendar on my laptop but my iPhone calendar does not get any changes to it unless I sync from iTunes. I have iCloud Calendar sync turned on on the laptop and the iPhone. Can you help?
Thanks a lot in advance for anyone able to assist me with these issues. Really appreciate it.
Best regards,
Juha

Solved it myself. What I did:
1) I have four Lion OS and two iOS devices.
2) I kept one computer with the complete address book I wanted to start with but disconnecting it from iCloud's Contact sync via Apple Menu > System Preferences > iCloud uncheck Contact Sync
3) Logged into iCloud.com and deleted all the contacts and groups manually ( many keyboard shortcuts worked )
4) On the main computer, using textedit, I replaced semicolons I was using to delimit items in the notes field with backslashes.
5) Once I confirmed all the other computers and devices had no entries in Address Book, on the main computer I turned back on iCloud Contact syncing. It worked. Correct count of entries and no more breaking notes at the semicolons!
6) Immediately all the other iCloud computers and devices updated to the correct notes! Finally.

Switching from Entourage to ical, mail, and address book- duplications?

I am tired of the slowness of Entourage and was thinking of switching to all of the native mac programs. Any suggestions or comments on whether this is a good idea or not?
Also, will all of my information be duplicated. I have about 3 gigs of information and I don't want to needlessly store it if I don't need to. Can I get some advice on where to find and extract that information from the entourage program so I am not eating up disc space unnecessarily.
Thank you.

Three weeks ago I switched from Entourage and Palm Desktop to Apple mail, address book and ical. It was a tad painful because I ended up with a lot of duplicates as I had email and some contact info in Entourage and several thousand contacts in Palm Desktop.
However after a couple of solid nights sorting out the duplicates all the contact info for each person is now in one place.
Word of warning though when you are checking address book entries make sure you keep backing up the changes (File - Backup address book) because for some inexplicable reason a couple of times all the entries in address book vanished.
Also the check for duplicates option in address book might be great for some but for me it created contacts that had their addresses and phone numbers duplicated several times.
After initial teething problems (getting used to the different programs) I am now pretty happy with the changeover. I am ecstatic to not be seeing the constant Entourage error message of 'your database is damaged and needs to be rebuilt' which entourage kept throwing at me (even after repeated rebuilds).
I have a Palm Treo and Address Book and iCal sync fine with that as well (after installing the conduit).
You'll also find in mail that you can't do as much snazzy formatting as you could with Entourage (ie numbered lists and bullet points) but hopefully Apple will address that in later updates. In the meantime if I'm desperate for formatting I write the email in rtf and paste it across complete with bluet points.
Sorry to drone on but wanted to give you some moral support.
Oh by the way the entourage data is stored in Home folder - Documents - Microsoft User Data - Office 2004 Identities - main identity - database (almost need a compass and flashlight to find it). To be on the safe side burn it to a dvd just in case and then trash it and all it's little friends (rules, lists, signatures and the other main identity folders.
Good luck

Address Book - duplication of surnames

Occasionally I see this occur - I have approx 1400 contacts in my Address Book. Let's say one of them is John Smith. The first name and surname are properly placed in the First and Last fields. Some time later I discover that John Smith still exists but that there is also a John Smith Smith. On checking I find that the new entry has both the first name and the surname in the First field. Deleting these mysterious contacts works for a while, and then they come back. Not always the same people and seemingly at random times. With 1300 contacts, who has time to check that all of them are still 'good'?

I would be interested in seeing a "before and after"
set of details, if we could catch one. Maybe you
would try this: select the All group, then
File/Export to save a copy of all your contacts as a
vCard. Then the next time one of these duplicates
occurs, select that contact in AB and use File/Export
to make a vCard of that person (or just drag the card
icon from AB to the desktop). Now open your full
vCard with TextEdit, locate the entry for the
newly-bad contact, and copy everything between the
BEGIN:VCARD and the END:VCARD and paste it here,
along with the recent single vCard, first editing out
any sensitive details (in particular, email
addresses). (Alternatively, email them to me to keep
them off the forum).
AK
Alrighty, I'll watch for the next occurence and try to remember to send along the info. Meanwhile, I'll have to check and be sure there are no 'corrupted contacts' at present. If not, I'll send you along the 'pure' Vcard.

Time Machine Locked after MacBook Air reformatted. My MacBook Air was overfull due to an Address book issue (duplication) so after many attempts to clear space, I ended up wiping out the system and reloading Lion.

Time Machine Locked after MacBook Air reformatted. My MacBook Air was overfull due to an Address book issue (duplication) so after many attempts to clear space, I ended up wiping out the system and reloading Lion. This resulted in the Time Machine thinking that it was now connected to a different computer. Apparently this diables the existing information.
Now I can see that the back-ups exist (back to Sept 2012) but they are greyed out, therefore unavailale to restore. Again, this seems like an issue that shouldn't be happening. The whole point of the Time Machine is to enable reinstatement of data after catastrophic failure. What if my computer actually had to be replaced due to a hardware issue? How would I beableto restore anything?
The path already (unsuccessfully) taken;
Open Library on the computer, Open Time Machine, Select Correct date, drill down to correct data you wish to restore, click "Restore".
This did not work because the correct date was greyed out. Restore key was greyed out.

Time Machine Locked after MacBook Air reformatted. My MacBook Air was overfull due to an Address book issue (duplication) so after many attempts to clear space, I ended up wiping out the system and reloading Lion. This resulted in the Time Machine thinking that it was now connected to a different computer. Apparently this diables the existing information.
Now I can see that the back-ups exist (back to Sept 2012) but they are greyed out, therefore unavailale to restore. Again, this seems like an issue that shouldn't be happening. The whole point of the Time Machine is to enable reinstatement of data after catastrophic failure. What if my computer actually had to be replaced due to a hardware issue? How would I beableto restore anything?
The path already (unsuccessfully) taken;
Open Library on the computer, Open Time Machine, Select Correct date, drill down to correct data you wish to restore, click "Restore".
This did not work because the correct date was greyed out. Restore key was greyed out.

Duplication of Records in Address Book on iPad Sync

I have multiple records which have been duplicated in my Address Book on my desktop Mac; I believe it has arisen since I have been synchronizing between desktop and iPad. How can I eliminate these duplicated record entries and stop this duplication?

Here are some past threads on this problem that may help:
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=11620245&#11620245
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=11678878&#11678878

Duplication of Address book entries

At the first sync with the Address book - it was excellent transfer to the iphone - with all the 25-30 groups being effortlessly transferred. Then the nightmare of duplicating entries. The entire address book got duplicated in the subsequent sync. Tried to empty the address book and overwrite the iphone. At first instance the sync appeared ok - but then suddenly the address book on iphone has got triplicated. Does the Iphone has internal data storage as the Application support - address book - contains address book data of previous. How should I remove the Triplicate addresses created in the iphone?

You can export your contacts to CSV (comma separated value) format and pull that into Numbers or Excel, then export it back. Use the first part of this program (it's a converter for GMail) to do the CSV step.
Matt

How can I delete all my contacts in Address Book?

I had syncing issues between my Entourage 2008 contacts, my Address Book contacts, and the PowerMac for Blackberry application. As a reference, I have around 5,000 contacts. I have solved the issue, but there is some collateral damage: read on.
Address Book duplicated my contacts two or three times, and it also created around 60,000 empty contacts. I have been able to clean the Entourage contacts, which only suffered from duplication but not from new empty entries.
I tried to delete the Address Book duplicate and empty entries. The easy way out, I thought, was to Select All and delete. It does not work. Given I have ended with around 80,000 contacts, after I Select All, and try to delete, the program hangs, and I have to Force Quit the Address Book application.
I tried to locate the Address Book file where contacts are stored, but I have not found an obvious name that would point to it, nor have I read anything about such file in the different discussion forums. So no success on this.
I have even used scripts in the past for deleting duplicates and merging contacts in Entourage, but I have not found one for Address Book that could take care of the massive number of empty entries with "No Name".
So, is there a way to delete all my contacts in Address Book?

There are two possibilities you can try:
1. Delete all your duplicate entries. You can try downloading and running this Applescript Remove Duplicates, which will create a group named Duplicates in Address Book, from which you should be able to delete those entries, by selecting the Group, then in the next column to the Right, select all the entries and choose Delete Cards from the Edit menu.
2. If that doesn't work, you can do this:
1. Quit Address Book if it's running.
2. Go to ~/Library/Application Support/AddressBook and delete an of these files/folders you find there:
• ABPerson.skIndex
• ABPerson.skIndexInverted
• Address Book - xxxxx.abbu
• AddressBook.data
• AddressBook.data.beforesave
• AddressBook.data.previous
• Images
• LastImport.plist
3. Restart Address Book and see if the default cards are there (Apple card, and your Me card) and if all seems to be working correctly.
Mulder

How can I stop a shared address book from duplicating groups?

Hi,
in our company we want to have one central address book, because we basically all contact the same people.
What I did was create an account on my Mac Mini Server and added that users address book to everyones addressbook app.
The problem I have now is that regularily all groups we have are duplicated, simply by opening the addressbook on a second machine.
Is there a better way of sharing an address book?
How do I stop the duplication of addresses?
(All machines are Mountain Lion!)
Thank you for any tips!
All the best
Christoph

Look under <del>Tools|Options|Advanced...</del> '''[http://kb.mozillazine.org/Menu_differences_in_Windows,_Linux,_and_Mac" Tools|Options|]Composition|Addressing'''

How to restore Address Book and then add working iCloud Account?

OK i'm going insane trying to resolve this one.... all started with a shed load of Duplicates!
3 devices: MacBook Pro, iMac, iPhone 4S
I finally upgraded the MBP to 10.7.2, the iMac already was and the iPhone was already 5.0.1
I've held off moving to iCloud from Mobile.me because of the 10.6.x MBP
...so now all on the same song sheet, I clicked the upgrade to iCloud from my MBA and all went well!
The MBA pushed 1352 address cards to the iCloud and I only had the iCloud account showing in my Address Book.
My iPhone then happily went iCloud and downloaded ALL the calendars (and I have far too many....I'll clean up soon, promise ;-)
but i hadnt turned on Contact sync for a very good reason.
I DON'T WANT ALL MY CONTACTS ON MY iPHONE!
So having found some advice, it says you have to keep everything you dont want in iCloud, in the On My Mac account
(which I didnt appear to have at that point)
I turned my iMac on and connected to the iCloud, all went well and I again had a single iCloud account in Address Book with 1352 cards
I then went Address Book/Preferences/General/Deafult Account/On My Mac and it generated the empty On My Mac account in the Address Book.
Highlighting ALL my iCloud address cards and dragging them to On My Mac, a successful duplication was made.
Highlighting ALL my iCloud address cards and deleting, all three devices now had NO contacts in the iCloud related accounts (what I wanted)
I then turned on Contact sync on my iPhone and it pushed 186 contacts to the iCloud and in turn to all 3 devices (perfect!)
but then came the fun part....
On my iMac, the On My Mac account had gone from 1352 to over 1900 with loads of duplicates. So I selected ALL deleted and restored from an Address Book backup prior to going iCloud. This began my problem....
if I restore it WIPES the iCloud account from the machine and leaves me with 1352 in On My Mac,
if I try and add an iCloud account it then wants to upload the 1352 into the iCloud which I dont want.
If I delete all, setup iCloud acount first I get the 186 correctly, but the moment I restore from backup it overwrites and I'm again left with On My Mac and no iCloud account
AHHHHHH!
how on earth do I get the working iCloud with 186 (which is perfectly fine on 3 devices) and restore 1352 in ON MY MAC, so my iMac Address Book has two accounts very seperate from each other. I want the 186 on my MacBook Pro and iPhone, but I want an iCloud account with 186 and an On My Mac with 1352 on the iMac
ANY advice welcome
TIA

Thanks havinabubble for your assistance. I'm having all sorts of problems with iCloud because we've got iphone 3g's which means the iCloud is working on our mac and ipads but not on our iphones. I've been trying to solve this problem for days and I lost my "on my mac account" along the way. Once I followed your section where you gave directions how to "generate the empty On My Mac account" I was able to re-establish my contacts list on my mac. Your suggestion was very valuable. Thank you.
havinabubble wrote:
SOLVED!
thanks to a bit of sleep and https://discussions.apple.com/message/17282476#17282476
cheers to Winston Churchill who's post gave me the solution!
with On My Mac selected, highlight and DRAG TO DESKTOP
then highlight ALL and DELETE ALL
add the iCloud account which replaces ALL contacts with the 186 from the iCloud.
select Address Book/Preferences/General/Default Account/On My Mac and it generates the empty On My Mac account in the Address Book.
DRAG the 1352 back into On My Mac account
now have two accounts...
PROBLEM SOLVED, thanks Winston!

Microsoft Exchange Categories in iCal, Address Book and Mail

I work in a Microsoft environment with my MacBook Pro and would like to use iCal, Address Book and Mail as my default applications rather than Microsoft Oulook 2011, however, there is not support for the Microsoft Exchange Categories to be replicated into the various Apple applications. This results in my address book not to differentiate any longer from my contact categories stored on the Exchange server, nor my calendar. Categories can be created in iCal and other Apple applications but it then requires for the event or contact to be duplication "On my Mac" which makes me loose my synchronization with other systems. Any idea about to fix that?

Same issue here. I would love to migrate to iCal but the lack of support for categories is a limiting factor. Same applies to Contacts.

Address Book/Contacts/Google/iPhone Sync = Tons of Duplicates?

Hi, folks - I'm syncing my contacts with Google, using the following:
1. iPhone: Google Sync for Calendars & Contacts using Microsoft Exchange
2. Macbook: Address Book also syncing to Google under Preferences.
This setup is creating tons of duplicate contacts each day. It's usually the same handful of contacts that get duplicated dozens and dozens of times throughout the day, bloating my few hundred contacts into thousands of entries.
I'm guessing that the set-up below is creating some kind of infinite loop for certain items, and doubles them every time it tries to sync. But I can't find any common characteristics for the items that keep duplicating.
I'm sure the easiest fix would be to turn off option 2, and stop trying to keep my Macbook's local contact list in sync. But that's my way of "backing up" incase my Google account ever gets hosed for any reason.
Does anybody know:
1. How I can fix my set-up above to stop the dupe-loop, OR
2. How to troubleshoot each contact that's duping, fix fields/data etc OR
3. A better way to auto-backup Google so I don't have to use Option 2 at all?
Thanks!
Michael

Have the same problem.
Today, as usual did a sync and was very pleased to find that almost all my contacts on IPhone were duplicated. Weird, not all of them.
The problem is that I have to double check every contact, because the duplication was a bit...weird also. Not all duplicates are the same. One might contain all info about a contact and another one might have only one phone number.
So, this is a BIG problem.
I tried deleting all contacts from my Outlook database and sync.
Oh, the joy of having all your IPhone contacts DELETED without even a warning.
Restored a backup and got all my Contacts back, duplicated of course.
Believe me, I am DEAD AFRAID of using ITunes again. Maybe for the ones that did the programing of it might have some logic, but for me, as well as for many Apple customers with the same problem (and more) I think NOT.
This piece of software must have been written on some crazy after party weekend, because I cannot understand how such a big name like Apple can release such a badly written application.
Do we have an alternative to ITunes?
I am using it for backing up my contacts, because I tend to loose my phone all the time
I would use it for purchasing some interesting software from the store, but, most of the software I like...are not in my country's store :)) (Google Earth, The Discovery software, etc). Way to go!
I do remember Nokia and their little application. So easy to do anything. Apple, weak up!!!
Message was edited by: Inteq

Yahoo! Mail glitches with Lion mail client and Address Book app

I had really been looking forward to using my Yahoo! mail account in the Lion mail client but now that it is here and I have set it up and used it for a few days I am noticing the following issues:
New mail is not always received or is received late. Yahoo! Webmail portal shows new items but these sometimes do not appear in Lion mail client even after a manual 'get mail' check.
Mail marked as read in Yahoo! Webmail portal or in mail clients in iOS devices such as iPhone or iPad is not marked as read in Lion mail client, however the reverse does work (i.e. mail marked as read in Lion mail client does mark the message as read in webmail and in clients on iOS devices).
Yahoo! Aliases are not supported. Yes, you can add aliases by inserting the other email addresses in the 'Email Address' field of the account settings, but you cannot add more than one display name.
I have also found that if you turn on Yahoo! contacts via the tick-box in the new 'Mail, Contacts & Calendars' pref pane in System Preferences that I end up with random duplicated contacts. These duplicates are not seen on iOS devices, just in the Address Book app. If you delete a duplicate contact, it deletes the contact altogether. However, I have found that if you keep contacts unticked in the pref pane and add your Yahoo! account the old-fashioned way (i.e. via the Address Book app's own preferences) then the contacts sync through perfectly with no duplications.
I would be interested to know if anybody else is experiencing these issues. It may be worth noting that mine is not a @yahoo.com address but @xtra.co.nz which belongs to my ISP here in New Zealand, but the mail is managed by Yahoo!. The account works perfectly as a Yahoo! account on iOS devices and does appear to be working in Lion, except for these small glitches but I don't imagine these are specific to @xtra.co.nz addresses.
Thanks
Steve

i've had the same experience here.
essentially it seems like lion mail.app just takes an incredibly long time to pickup new changes from the IMAP server at yahoo.
ios and webmail are obviously much quicker.
if it is working on ios, why does is it so delayed in mail?
any solutions out there?

Address book on iCloud

After having bought a new iMac and register to iCloud, I noticed after a while that certain names on my Address book on iCloud were reproduced a great number of times, contaminating also my new iMac.
Yesterday, I erased all the adress book on iCloud, made a copy of the adress book from my old iMac to the new one and synchronised with iCloud and my iPhone.
The operation seemed to be successful, but today I see that the poblem is the same again : a great number of duplication.

Finally, I stopped using iCloud for address book. I cut the link with my iMac and my iPhone and I synchronized iPhone with my iMac.

What is the best way to sync Address Book contacts?

Please help!
I run a small Mac network and I need to sync all (we have 8 Macs) the Mac's Address Book's with each other and also with 5 different iPhones. We have a Mac Server running Tiger and all the Macs are running Tiger. 4 of the Macs are Intel. The server is PowerPC.
At the moment I am just using 1 .Mac account to sync to them all, but this is causing many problems with duplications, errors and 'stress!'
The reason for the above setup is money. But, as the problems continue and the syncing become more important, money is now allowed to be spent.
My question really is, as the subject header says, 'What is the best way to sync Address Book contacts?' In the past I have tried XC Connect, and a few other apps, but with the introduction of the iPhones, the setup has become more complex.
If I were to buy all new Intel Macs and an Intel Mac Server all running Snow Leopard, would the 'Address Book Server' do the job? I have found very little information on the net and the information I did find was all negative.
Is there something Leopard can do that Tiger can't? Is Tiger nolonger a good enough system to try and run an Address Book network?
Does anybody else out there in the Mac world have a similar setup to mine, and if so, how do you have your setup.
Incidentally, ALL users, incuding iPhone users, need read & write access to the Address Book!!
Any solutions or suggestions would be most welcome.
Thanks in advance
col_t

Oh, I meant Leopard does do more than Tiger Server.
I don't know enough about Server, even less abut Syncing.
SL is to new, not enough time to iron out the kinks yet imho.
One day SL will be better than Leo, but...
I'd ask over in server...
http://discussions.apple.com/category.jspa?categoryID=96
Or perhaps Collaboration Services...
http://discussions.apple.com/forum.jspa?forumID=1352
They may even have a different opinion on SL.

Address book duplication

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