Apologies in advance for the long posting. Been using Contacts (formerly Address Book) on my (former) iMac & current MacBook Pro for about 20 yrs. Since the beginnings of iPads, iPhones, & iCloud, I have used Contacts to keep all my contacts synced between my MacBook & devices for many yrs. For the last couple yrs, I’ve also been exporting the Contacts on my MacBook to a backup file in Finder every couple months just to have another “just in case” backup for Contacts.
An issue started about a week ago where there were differences between what was shown on my MacBook & what was on my devices & in iCloud. Tried to troubleshoot myself (all settings were correct, tried importing the backup file, & other things) but couldn’t get it to work. Kept ending up w/either a partial Contacts file or had duplicate & triplicate entries.
Finally called Apple tech support last night; had 4 phone calls w/4 different senior advisors; spent hours on this. Finally have everything working but this brought a few glaring issues to my attention.
When lists are created in Contacts (to categorize the entries), those lists are not saved when the Contacts file is backed up. All the entries in Contacts are saved but not the lists so if you restore Contacts from a backup, you lose all your lists. Took me a great deal of time to recreate those today.
If you have anything in the Notes field in Contacts, nothing in Notes is saved to the backup file. All the miscellaneous info I had in the Notes fields was lost; no way I can ever get that info back.
iCloud (website) has a Data Recovery function that can be used to restore a previous version of Contacts (or Calendar.) That Data Recovery function also does not store the lists created in Contacts nor the info in the Notes fields.
After successfully recreating/restoring Contacts on my MacBook, all my devices, & on iCloud, I asked a senior advisor at Apple about losing my lists & the Notes fields. As far as he knew, those things should be saved by a manual backup & should still be saved by using the Data Recovery function. Appears this is not the case.
My question is 2-fold: What can I do to backup Contacts (either via iCloud or on my MacBook) to be certain absolutely everything is backed up? Apple can’t answer that question as Apple seems to think everything is backed up w/an exported file. If that’s not possible, is there another non-Apple contacts app that will do what I thought Contacts was doing? It all worked so easily & (apparently) seamlessly for close to 20 yrs so I never bothered to look for any other way to do this.
Very disappointed right now; looking for a light at the end of the tunnel.
Thanks in advance for any insight/suggestions anyone might have.
If any notes within Contacts are lost in a “Contacts back-up” file, it may be prudent to move those notes to the dedicated Notes.app
The Notes app is much more powerful these days and can do a lot more than just use plain text in the notes field in Contacts.
I appreciate the suggestion but doesn’t solve my issue. I use the Notes app a lot for many things. But since each entry in Contacts has a Notes section, it seems to make sense to keep info about that contact in the Contacts app. For some people, I keep the names of their kids in the notes section in Contacts. Or if I see a new doctor & want to remember who referred me to him/her, when I saw him/her, or what his/her specialty is, I put it in the notes section in Contacts.
That’s a lot of miscellaneous info to keep in the Notes app, wouldn’t even know how to organize it to keep track of it all.
I just tested this. In the Contacts app, if you select all Contacts and choose “Export vCard” rather than “Export Archive”, it will preserve the notes field if you import the vCard archive (the vCard archive will contain all of the contacts that you had selected.)
So far, though, I haven’t been able to figure out how to get List info back, so what I would do is to Control-click on the List in the sidebar, select Export List vCard, which will default to name the file the name of the list. Then you can import the vCard files one at a time - it will put the newly imported cards into a list in the sidebar called “Last Import” and you can manually create the list and then select and drag them to the list from the selection. Again, the vCards I tested with doing it this way preserved the note field.
I did Export vCard, not Export Archive. Even tried it again while working w/Apple support, still never recovered the notes or the lists. I’ve never used Export Archive, have always used Export vCard.
I’m beginning to think all this happened while Apple was updating something in iCloud. At one point last night, after I did a Data Recovery on the iCloud site, a message popped up that the recovery was complete but iCloud Contacts was temporarily unavailable due to maintenance by Apple. Maybe that’s why the Export vCard worked for you but not for me.
Somehow, w/in the last week, my iCloud Contacts file became corrupted and when I chose to finally try to fix it, Apple was doing some iCloud maintenance which made my problem worse.
Does anyone have suggestions for an alternative app to Contacts that will keep my MacBook, iPhone, & iPad synced?
Yes, I do have a Time Machine backup. But I have been told by Apple that it won’t help for this. Any data that is iCloud data does not get backed up by Time Machine. Any backup or recovery for iCloud data is only available through the iCloud website, using the Data Recovery function.
Email, Calendar, & Contacts data that is on an iCloud account is not backed up in a Time Machine backup.
And I did try using the Data Recovery function on iCloud; it only made matters worse. I ended up w/4 copies of some of my Contacts entries. Finally exported my backup file (that I had made a couple weeks ago) from Finder to the iCloud site; that worked but I still lost all my lists in Contacts & anything that was in the notes field in Contacts. But at least I ended up w/most of my contacts & only one copy of each.
If you are going to export to VCard, go to the preferences and choose V3.0 (if it isn’t chosen already) just on general principles. Both 2.1 and 3.0 export the note. They do not include list membership.
The most complete backup is to export a Contacts Archive but it is proprietary so if you want to assure maximum longevity VCard is the way to go (it is, in fact, a simple field:data format in text). I would say do both.
I spent a great deal of time in the Contacts API years ago, so I valiantly chose to poke around in the Contacts Archive. It is a veritable rats nest (David C you won’t believe the scale. abcddb files are sqlite) but it’s understandable given legacy stuff, multiple languages, multiple international address formats, custom fields, field languages different from data, iCloud syncing, local syncing, modification reports and on and on. It appears it does record lists but I am utterly unwilling to test this.
I suspect your theory that you had an unfortunate collision with an iCloud update is true. In the meantime, do both a Contacts Archive and VCard archive every six months or so.
I don’t spelunk around contact apps much (Contacts is fine for me) but most of them use the Apple Contacts database and present a different user interface. The question for you is whether their backup system preserves grouping and I’m not so sure you’ll find that.
I have had some issues with Contacts and Lists over the years but now use BusyContacts app which is much more user friendly IMO for lists and includes its own backup making capability. It syncs with iCloud. I admit I haven’t tested this for Lists and Notes but would be surprised if not backed up. BusyMac are a very reputable Mac software house and have good support.
I just checked Settings in Contacts; vCard V3.0 is already chosen so ︎.
I’ve always done the export as Export vCard; to be honest, I don’t know what vCard Archive is. I see it as an option but I’m not familiar w/it & don’t know how it differs. I do the “regular” vCard export every two months so luckily the most recent version was only a couple weeks old. Still lost a couple entries but my major concern was losing the notes fields & the lists; I truly thought those would be included when doing Export vCard. Live & learn.
I’ll take a look at BusyContacts. I’ve heard of it over the years but since I thought Contacts was working more or less flawlessly, I never looked into an alternative. I’m beginning to think it’s time to look at other options.
I believe the vCard format is plain text, so opening that in BBedit or similar should let you see if the notes field is actually empty, and that you’re not encountering an import problem vs data loss.
After reading your reply, I went back to my “old” exported vCard file & opened it in TextEdit. It’s hard to follow as there’s so much “garbage” in there but I manage to scroll to a few entries that I knew had data in the notes field when the vCard file was created.
The only items in each entry (assuming the entry had those fields filled) were the name, address, phone #s, emails, & URL. It doesn’t appear that any entry has data in the notes field.
So, to me, this means that the export to vCard function does not include an export of the notes field. It also probably means there’s no export of the various lists either but the file is too long & difficult to read thru to be certain about the lists.
Bottom line: it appears that the export to vCard function does not truly export all the data in the vCard. That would have been nice to know before I started making regular backups of the vCard file.
Not sure what I’ll do differently for the future to preserve the notes fields & the lists. It also doesn’t explain what initially went wrong w/Contacts & iCloud & why recreating the Contacts file was so difficult (kept adding 2, 3, or 4 copies of each entry) but I’ll just have to accept I got trapped in a temporary iCloud dysfunction.
Thank you for letting me know the vCard format was plain text; never would have occurred to me.
OK, I’ve done some experimentation on Sequoia 15.2. These tests were done without iCloud syncing. If you are replacing the entire contact list you should be careful when connected to iCloud (see various how-to’s on your favorite tech website).
VCard Export
You can export individuals, a group, or the entire set of contacts either with the Export menu or by dragging the selected contacts onto the Desktop.
VCard export does include the Notes field and any custom fields you’ve added via the Card menu / Add Field.
VCard export does not include lists.
Contacts Archive
The Contacts Archive file (.abbu) appears to save your entire contacts environment including lists & smart lists.
If you import a Contacts Archive, it will completely replace your contact list. It will warn you it’s going to do that.
Your mileage may vary but when you import the archive it will appear as though no lists were imported. If you create a new list, the archived lists magically appear. I’ve found list management to be problematic over the years (refusing to do a rename, not accepting dragged contacts etc.) and the way Contacts caches things means I can’t say definitively that the lists will import but they did import for me after a system shutdown and reboot so . . . .
Happy Discoveries
Reading the up-to-date documentation () I made two happy discoveries.
First, if you create a new blank Numbers document and drag selected contacts onto the spreadsheet, it will load the spreadsheet with all the selected contacts. You can then save it or export a .csv file etc. Gasp!
Second, Contacts now imports more file types: vCard (with the extension .vcf), archive (.abbu), LDAP Data Interchange Format (.ldif), or a tab-delimited or comma-separated value (.csv) text file. Further, with the exception of an archive (.abbu) file, it will synchronize the import with your existing contacts (eliminate duplicates, choose to update individual ones, etc.).
Thank you for your extensive research into this; it’s very helpful & will be useful for creating future backups. I am also using Sequoia 15.2.
I agree; based on the problems I had restoring/recreating Contacts, it must be done when NOT connected to iCloud. Unfortunately, as I learned this week, once you reconnect to iCloud, any changes made to Contacts on the Mac while not connected to iCloud will be wiped out when you reconnect to iCloud. It appears the iCloud version takes precedence so when you reconnect the Mac to iCloud, the iCloud version will replace the version that’s on the Mac.
If you’re making the changes on the Mac, you need to clear out the version of Contacts on the iCloud site before reconnecting the Mac to iCloud, otherwise you end up w/a scrambled combination of the Mac version & the iCloud version along w/duplicates & triplicates. (Also temporarily disconnect all other devices w/Contacts from iCloud until Contacts on the Mac & on the iCloud site are perfectly synced.)
I understand you found that vCard export includes the Notes field. Unfortunately, looking back at my vCard export file from a few weeks ago, none of the data I had in the Notes field was included. I even looked at the file from an earlier vCard export & it doesn’t include the Notes field either. Not sure what happened.
I just did a fresh test vCard export w/the current Contacts data & it does show the Notes info. This leads me to think there was some corruption in my original Contacts file or some other Contacts/iCloud/data problem that has now been “fixed.”
Based on your insights, I tried to export a Contacts Archive file (.abbu). But I don’t see a way to see the data in the file w/o importing it into the Contacts app & I’m not interested in creating further problems so I’m not going to worry about that for now.
I did try creating a blank Numbers document & dragging a couple contacts into the spreadsheet. (First the Mac requires you to change a setting that allows Numbers to have access to Contacts.) I found that it did import names, addresses, phone #s, & emails into Numbers, but it did not import the Notes field. I even tried adding several additional columns to the spreadsheet to make certain there was room for the Notes, but they did not show up in Numbers.
I also tried exporting Contacts as a PDF. That seems to export all the data including the Notes field. It does not export the lists though.
For the future, I’ll continue to do the vCard export every couple months in case I ever need to restore Contacts again; hopefully that will never be necessary. At the same time, I’ll also do a PDF export. While that can’t be directly added back into Contacts, it will give me another version to look at all the data to make sure I haven’t lost anything.
I will also make a list of all the lists I have in Contacts so that I have a reference in case I ever need to recreate them again. And I’ll go thru each Contact & add in the Note field which list(s) that contact is in.
I know this seems like a lot of work but once your Contacts file gets corrupted, you worry about it happening again & it’s a lot of work to recreate. Makes me wish for the old days when I just had a small paper address book that I kept at my desk & could slip into my purse when I needed it.
Thanks very much for all your help & suggestions; most appreciated.
︎.
) I made two happy discoveries.