Contacts duplicated after updating to Big Sur

Another new issue. Since upgrading to Big Sur I notice that all my contacts are duplicated. All my “Groups” are duplicated. This is on Contacts on both my Mac and my iPhone.

When I go into groups I also have a listing for “All iCloud”. I tried unchecking one of the two listings for each group (when I do that “All iCloud” unchecked too), but then I discovered that some contacts could not be found . Further research revealed that these are contacts that were never assigned to a particular group. I assigned one (of a duplicated) contact to one (of a duplicated) group and was able to see and search for that contact - If I had the entered group checked.

I guess I could just assign every unassigned contact to a group - but I can’t seem to find out who’s unassigned. Also - I’d like to find a more elegant solution than assigning someone to a group every time I add a contact.

Anyone have an idea?

Thanks,

Sam

Jesus - that happened to my iTunes library when I upgraded to Catalina - getting really tired of these rushed out the door upgrades so they can deny you support even with apple care on a newer product because your not using the latest worst OS!

Sam:

I upgraded Mojave → Big Sur yesterday and now all my 6,000+ contacts are duplicated.

The recommended fix I found for this is to restore a Contacts backup from iCloud:

Unfortunately, I don’t back up my Contacts to iCloud. (I sync them via Google Contacts.) so I don’t have anything to restore.

How did your get rid of your duplicate Contacts?

Thank you.

  • nello
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I had this happen to me, and IIRC it happened once on a previous update, as well. Sorry I don’t have a non-brute force solution. In my case I didn’t know about the iCloud fix so I went through my Contacts and deleted all the duplicates. Fortunately for me, I don’t have 6000 contacts!

More importantly, why does this happen and can’t Apple keep it from happening?

I called Apple and the Gal walked me through a procedure. AIR, there was a menu option to “Delete Duplicate Records” that took care of most of them. I still occasionally find a duplicate and manually delete it.

Sam

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As I mentioned above, I sync my Contacts among my (Apple) devices via Google Contacts, NOT iCloud.

The last change I remember making to Contacts (on my iPhone running iOS 15.0.1) was yesterday mid-morning. I upgraded my iMac to Big Sur in the mid-afternoon. I presume that the changes that I made in Contacts on my iPhone would have synced via Google from my iPhone to my iMac within this several-hour period.

Details:

  1. iCloud
    I logged into iCloud (iCloud) and see no duplicates. I don’t any duplicates but it has a count of only 4,882 entries and several changes I made yesterday morning on my iPhone are NOT reflected here. There are NO archives listed on iCloud (https://www.icloud.com/settings/).

  2. iMac
    I opened the Contacts application (ver 13.0 2452.7). When I select the “Google - All Google” tab, it says there are “11,934 Cards” and they all appear to be duplicated. When I select the “On My Mac - All on My Mac” tab, there are 4,937 Cards and none of them appear to be duplicated. When I select the “Directories - Google” tab, no contacts are listed. When I select the “Smart Groups - Last Import” tab, only one contact is listed, mine; it says “Siri Found in Accounts.”

  3. Google Contacts
    When I log into my Google Contacts (https://contacts.google.com/?hl=en), it says that there are 12,019 contacts and all of them appear to be duplicated. It offers to “Merge & Fix” 2,973. I used to have just over 6,000 contacts in Google, so the total seems reasonable—except for being an odd number—if they were all duplicated. The "Merge & Fix number seems way too low so I’m hesitant to try it.

  4. iPhone
    Contacts on my iPhone all appear to be duplicated and the count is 12,035, slightly more than on Google but still odd.

Does anyone have any advice on what do do next?

  • nello

Does anyone have any idea why upgrading macOS duplicated my contacts on my iPhone (and Google)?!? I do NOT use macOS Contacts and I do NOT sync them to ANYTHING, not even iCloud.

Why/how would an upgrade to my iMac effect my iPhone and Google?!?

I posted this problem to Apple Discussions:

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/253217455

UPDATE: Oct 5, 2021

Rolling back my Contacts on Google seems to have done the trick!

https://support.google.com/contacts/answer/7280886

Scroll down to: Undo changes to contacts

2 Likes

Thank you! All my contacts were duplicated after upgrading from Mojave to Catalina. I started manually deleting duplicates but didn’t think to look for a command to delete them automatically. That seems to have worked fine. Now everyone’s birthday has stopped showing up twice in Calendar.