Address book makes duplicates, cannot seem to destroy them

My friend has a macbook and we copied her address book info from her old g4 imac by exporting the archive. Everything seemed fine but after a while of using it and adding/deleting contacts, many of them have duplicated themselves, several times over ending up with 1300 or so contacts where there were only around 300. We tried deleting them all, and re entering them, and it happened again. This has happened several times now. This morning I deleted all the contacts and everything having to do with address book from her user library folders, and when we launched Address Book, there was just her and Apple computer, just as if it were new. We added myself, quit, relaunched it, and it all looked good. Later she checked her email, clicked on the address book in Mail, and they were ALL back like some kind of a bad dream. Please help!
-Ben

Great.
I think the TM restore would have been much quicker. I was under the assumption that everything was good on the Mac address book.
Not sure what happened since then. Did you read my post (at 2:01pm above) before things went wrong?
"Try this. Disable iCloud on your mac. Select to keep contacts on the computer when quiting. Verify address book contains all your contacts. If you don't have a backup such as TM, export address book contacts so you will have a backup.
Your address book should have been correct or you could have corrected the contacts then and you would have had the backup files exported if you didn't have or trust TM.
Go to the iCloud website and delete all contacts there.
At the iCloud website, you should have been able to select all addresses at one time and delete. That would have left no addresses in iCloud. Only addresses left should have been on your Mac from the last step.
Once done, go back and log into iCloud on your computer and merge the contacts. The website should now contain the addresses from your address book.
Unless something else was wrong and creating multiple contacts, the only addresses in iCloud would have been merged from what was in your address book on your computer.
I don't know what happened or where we went wrong. I'll check back in the morning if you post any other info.
Hope it works out.

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Two Machines, Merge To Make 1 Address Book Without Duplicates

Hello,
So I currently have two computers I use:
MacBook (White) running Snow Leopard
iMac (21.5'') running OSX Lion
I use both computers, and also do email on both. I do email through Sparrow.app which when I add to address book, adds to the local address book. What this has resulted in is that I have 2 address books, both of them have SOME of the same contacts, but some that are not on the other...
My question is how could I merge these while still keeping the most up-to-date ones from each?
Then once they are sync-ed, is there a way to have them automatically update through iCloud (Note, I am willing to upgrade to Lion on my MacBook if this is possible, so that is not a factor)
Thanks!

Great.
I think the TM restore would have been much quicker. I was under the assumption that everything was good on the Mac address book.
Not sure what happened since then. Did you read my post (at 2:01pm above) before things went wrong?
"Try this. Disable iCloud on your mac. Select to keep contacts on the computer when quiting. Verify address book contains all your contacts. If you don't have a backup such as TM, export address book contacts so you will have a backup.
Your address book should have been correct or you could have corrected the contacts then and you would have had the backup files exported if you didn't have or trust TM.
Go to the iCloud website and delete all contacts there.
At the iCloud website, you should have been able to select all addresses at one time and delete. That would have left no addresses in iCloud. Only addresses left should have been on your Mac from the last step.
Once done, go back and log into iCloud on your computer and merge the contacts. The website should now contain the addresses from your address book.
Unless something else was wrong and creating multiple contacts, the only addresses in iCloud would have been merged from what was in your address book on your computer.
I don't know what happened or where we went wrong. I'll check back in the morning if you post any other info.
Hope it works out.

Address book issues: duplicates and syncing to phone

I know this is a common problem, and why Apple cannot offer a better solution, or system, is frustrating.
The problem is basically multiple entries in my address book.
I know the issue has to do with icloud, but I cannot figure out how to eliminate the multiple entries without going one by one and deleting.
And I hestiate to do this because I am afraid they will come back.
Frankly, I am very frustrated with icloud.
As far as I am concerned it has caused more problems than it is worth.
I am ready to disable it totally.
Problem is, if I do that now, then all of my contacts in my address boook disappear.
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Certain addresses on my computer do not appear on my phone.
The other day, I went to my phone to call a contact andf found I had about 6 entries for every contact.
I had to go in and disable a bunch of accounts, and finally got back to onbe set, but now some contacts are missing.
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Seems simple to me: if the info is duplicated, don't show it.
Seems like this simpkle rule could also apply to alerts: everytime I get an alert on my phone, it shows up 5 or 6 times in a row.
But that's another post.......

Great.
I think the TM restore would have been much quicker. I was under the assumption that everything was good on the Mac address book.
Not sure what happened since then. Did you read my post (at 2:01pm above) before things went wrong?
"Try this. Disable iCloud on your mac. Select to keep contacts on the computer when quiting. Verify address book contains all your contacts. If you don't have a backup such as TM, export address book contacts so you will have a backup.
Your address book should have been correct or you could have corrected the contacts then and you would have had the backup files exported if you didn't have or trust TM.
Go to the iCloud website and delete all contacts there.
At the iCloud website, you should have been able to select all addresses at one time and delete. That would have left no addresses in iCloud. Only addresses left should have been on your Mac from the last step.
Once done, go back and log into iCloud on your computer and merge the contacts. The website should now contain the addresses from your address book.
Unless something else was wrong and creating multiple contacts, the only addresses in iCloud would have been merged from what was in your address book on your computer.
I don't know what happened or where we went wrong. I'll check back in the morning if you post any other info.
Hope it works out.

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iCloud.
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Hi all!
I set up two email accounts in my BB, one is GMail and the other is Yahoo! Both address books are synchronized to the BB too.
Since I already had contacts in my BB list and now contacts coming from GMail and Yahoo!, there are now some duplicate entries (i.e. the same person name coming from BB contacts list and from Yahoo!).
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In your Address Book options, set it to not include duplicate names (And the names have to exactly alike), then use your Yahoo or Gmail address web accounts to delete the duplicates. That's one way.
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1. If any post helps you please click the below the post(s) that helped you.
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Address book issues - duplicates - accounts don't match

I have found duplicates entries for some of my address book entries, but not all.
As previously discussed in these forums, this turned out to be duplicates between the "On my Mac" and "iCloud" accounts. So I can deal with that.
However, upon looking at entries between these 2 accounts, I noticed that I have some entries in each account that are not present in the other account.
Here is a "made up" example to illustrate:
On My Mac
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2 contact only in "iCloud": Robert Blabla, Amy Thomas
This is what I have found on my Mac, only it is far bigger than just a couple of contacts.
Is there any way to get the accounts in sync?
Or is there any way to move a contact from one account to another account?
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Great.
I think the TM restore would have been much quicker. I was under the assumption that everything was good on the Mac address book.
Not sure what happened since then. Did you read my post (at 2:01pm above) before things went wrong?
"Try this. Disable iCloud on your mac. Select to keep contacts on the computer when quiting. Verify address book contains all your contacts. If you don't have a backup such as TM, export address book contacts so you will have a backup.
Your address book should have been correct or you could have corrected the contacts then and you would have had the backup files exported if you didn't have or trust TM.
Go to the iCloud website and delete all contacts there.
At the iCloud website, you should have been able to select all addresses at one time and delete. That would have left no addresses in iCloud. Only addresses left should have been on your Mac from the last step.
Once done, go back and log into iCloud on your computer and merge the contacts. The website should now contain the addresses from your address book.
Unless something else was wrong and creating multiple contacts, the only addresses in iCloud would have been merged from what was in your address book on your computer.
I don't know what happened or where we went wrong. I'll check back in the morning if you post any other info.
Hope it works out.

Address Book Shows Up - Cannot Quit It

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My understanding is that preference files can become corrupt if the computer is powered off without doing a proper shut down. This could occur if the computer is turned off by holding the power button or in the event of a power outage.
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I recently upgraded to Leopard from Tiger. Most things work great, but I've been noticing some very problematic discrepancies between Mail and my Address Book. For instance, I'll receive a message from one person, but when I hit reply, it will put an entirely different e-mail address in the reply box. Or in another case, someone wrote me and cc'd a colleague. But my iPhone mail and my Mail program disagree on who was cc'd (one shows a friend, the other shows a work colleague)—I don't know which one is correct!
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Hello, I think you'll have to Export them & use another Application...
How to Export Your Mac OS X Mail Address Book Contacts to a CSV File...
Export Your Mac OS X Mail Address Book Contacts to a CSV File
To save your contacts from the Mac OS X Address Book to a CSV (comma-separated values) file, which lets you import the data to many other address books:
Download and install AB2CSV.
Open AB2CSV.
Select Mode | CSV from the menu.To configure which fields will be exported, you can select AB2CSV | Preferences… from the menu and go to the CSV tab.
Now select File | Export from the menu.
Go to your Documents folder.
Click Choose.
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http://email.about.com/od/macosxmailtips/qt/How-To-Export-Your-Mac-Os-X-Mail-Add ress-Book-Contacts-To-A-Csv-File.htm
Then again, AB can be imported into...
Might look into NeoOffice...
http://www.neooffice.org/
Or Open Office...
http://porting.openoffice.org/mac/download/index.html
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Address book makes duplicates, cannot seem to destroy them

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