Using "On My Mac" to archive old Contacts

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I have accrued hundreds of contacts in the Contacts app over many years. I thought I would move many of them to local storage on my Mac to reduce the number stored on my iOS devices.
In OSX days the Contacts app automatically had a sidebar folder called On-my-Mac (or similar) but I could find no way to do this with Sonoma.
Eventually I found a tip - temporarily turn off the iCould account in Contacts:

contacts_accounts
contacts_accounts948Ă—498 42.4 KB

This creates an On my Mac folder in the sidebar. Now turn the iCloud account back on. Select the unused contacts, drag them to On-my-Mac and delete them from the iCloud account.

Before doing this I recommend creating an archive back-up of the Contacts data: File/Export/Contacts archive.

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Glad to hear that this works. I remember something similar on Notes, years ago. It supports a “On my Mac/iPhone/iPod/iPad” device, but that device would only appear if it contains at least one note, or if there are no network-based sources.

So I’d disable all my network sources for Notes, then create a note in that category, then turn the network sources back on again.

At some point, however, Apple added a preference to show the local storage device without having to do all this.

They should do the same for contacts, but at least there’s a workaround.