I have just completed moving 2,047 contact cards from Google, where they were hosted for “free” with some issues for many years but completely available to Google’s data-hungry eyes, to iCloud, which until recently I did not trust to keep my contacts corruption-free but seems to have become stable. (I’m sure even as I type this that there is contention embedded in every part of that sentence; oh, well.)
I use BusyContacts because of its baked-in ability to host accounts on multiple servers and services. BusyContacts synchronizes locally with Apple Contacts, and for a couple of services BusyMac just out-and-out says “for that function just use the Apple Contacts app.” Where I think it shines is in tagging contacts groups and then manipulating those groups. The function is analogous to the “lists” that Contacts provides, and BusyContacts can synchronize tags <—> lists back and forth. One of my other main purposes for getting out of Google is that tags or lists do not sync directly with Google addresses. Now that I can reasonably anticipate being in an all-Apple environment and not having to accommodate work computers on other platforms, I wanted to go with one sync server.
The process was theoretically straightforward:
- Copy all contacts to a “local” version of my list in BusyContacts
- Turn off syncing with Google
- Turn on syncing with iCloud
- Copy all contacts from the local list to iCloud
I settled on this sequence because a first attempt using Apple Contacts did not carry the lists with it, so I had a single huge contact list with no grouping.
iCloud requires that apps other than Apple’s own use an app-specific password to sync. I kept running into NSURL errors when I tried to enter the password I had generated. I finally solved that one by deleting the iCloud account in BusyContacts and then configuring a new one.
Once this was done, the process worked well. The cleanup step was turning on the Google version of the list one last time in BusyContacts, then trashing all the contacts. That won’t solve the data-hungry part for 30 days: while the contacts seemed to be gone from my Google account right away, they were in fact sitting in a “Trash” area where each one was labeled as having been deleted by a third-party app, and won’t be truly deleted for 30 days. That’s just fine by me, although I will have to go and check some time in November to be sure it really happened.
I kept both a vCard file with all the contacts and the local version of my address book as backup. BusyContacts also does a daily periodic backup so I do have fallbacks.
I’m hoping I don’t have to use them, though, and (again with the contention!) I feel better having my personal address list off Google.