My contacts show duplicates for address books on my iPads and iCloud. Why and what can I do to fix it?

Question

There are duplicates for all of my contacts showing up on both iPads and in iCloud. Why and how can I fix that? Thanks.

Answer 1

Firstly, may I ask you about your operating system, your profile states that you are using 10.6.8, lion and therefore iCloud will not work with 10.6.8.
Assuming you are using lion:
One reason you may have duplicates is that you have each contact listed under your 'iCloud' account AND under your 'on my mac' account. Only contacts in the iCloud account will sync.
Click on the ribbon in the Address Book to reveal 'Users & Groups', and then by selecting each account on the left side you will see which contacts are in which account. (make sure nothing is typed in the search field)
If this is the reason you have duplicates you have two options of dealing with the situation. Either you can leave the duplicates alone and click on one account or the other before clicking on the ribbon again to limit what you see to that account when you return to the main part of your Address Book.
Or you can delete all the contacts from one account (usually the 'on my mac' account if you want to continue syncing with iCloud). Click on the account you want to delete contacts from on the left side of the Address Book and select the first contact in the list on the right, shift click the last contact to select all and delete.
Finally, You may want to check your default account is set correctly in the Address Book preferences.
This user tip might help you understand how accounts work with Address Book.