I thought I finally had my iCloud thing organized on my new phone. I got the Calendars all in sync, and I thought I had the Contacts squared away. But I just went to my iCloud account online to edit one of my Contacts (because its easier to type on a keyboard than a phone). I edited it, hit "Done", and now all of my other Contacts are gone. Well, gone from iCloud Contacts on the web. The only one there is the one I just edited.

As of right now, they all still remain on my phone, including the edited version of the one I did online. How can I get the ones on my phone back onto my iCloud online? I thought they were all supposed to have the same info.

If it is a new phone, I would take advantage of Apple Support and call in. They can get you sorted out and walk you through the resolution. 1-800-MY-APPLE.

Export contacts on iPhone to a safe location first?

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Where is there dignity unless there is also honesty? - Cicero

Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a battle you know nothing about. —Wendy Mass

Funny you should mention that. I thought that exact same thing and called them, thinking it would be a simple setting to adjust. After a half hour on the phone with no solution and the support person's request for me to wait on hold until she checked with a next level up support person, I had to get back to work. They're calling me back after 5 to continue troubleshooting. Hopefully I'll get someone with a less pronounced accent and I won't have to ask them to repeat quite so often.

I will say I was impressed that they could screen share on the phone. Once connected, their little arrow was on my phone screen pointing out menu items to click on, etc. They couldn't actually operate the phone, but it was pretty cool nonetheless, and much easier than only directing me where to go. I sure hope the person I get after 5 will be able to get this squared away.

Sorry to hear the first support contact didn't go well. I didn't know about the phone screen share. That is cool! Hopefully the next person is better equipped or able to hand you off to 2nd tier support quickly.

My normal procedure is to get them into Contacts on my Mac; easy to find dupes, merge, and edit info. Export the Mac’s contacts first!

Once they are all cleaned up, sync with the phone

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wurm
I thought I finally had my iCloud thing organized on my new phone. I got the Calendars all in sync, and I thought I had the Contacts squared away. But I just went to my iCloud account online to edit one of my Contacts (because its easier to type on a keyboard than a phone).

I hope the issue gets straightened out but I have a question…

If you were doing this on your computer, why not just do it in the Contacts application rather than iCloud on the Web? All the data between you devices is synchronized.

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wurm
I thought I finally had my iCloud thing organized on my new phone. I got the Calendars all in sync, and I thought I had the Contacts squared away. But I just went to my iCloud account online to edit one of my Contacts (because its easier to type on a keyboard than a phone).

I hope the issue gets straightened out but I have a question…

If you were doing this on your computer, why not just do it in the Contacts application rather than iCloud on the Web? All the data between you devices is synchronized.

Well, I happened to be on my new work Macbook Pro and I signed onto iCloud out of curiosity to see if my Calendar entries were updated, which they were. I went to Contacts and they too were there. That was when I noticed one that I wanted to edit and wanted to see if it updated my phone after I did it. And that's when they all went away.

One thing that stumped the support person was that when she had me log into iCloud via Safari on my iPhone, I had only four icons on the screen: Photos, iCloud Drive, Notes, and Find iPhone. Not the 12 icons I see when I log on with the computer.

I'll be curious to hear what they have to say.

After two hours on the phone with two levels of Applecare...they still don't know what's going on. To be continued, with upper level engineering.

--edit--

Updated to add that Apple has the worst hold music I've ever heard anywhere.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 04/02/2021 08:02PM by wurm.

Do you have contacts syncing to a Mac?

I'd pull the Ethernet cable and disable WiFi to prevent a sync, open Contacts, select all of my contacts and do two exports: one as a Contacts archive and the other in Vcard format.

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Sarcany
Do you have contacts syncing to a Mac?

I'd pull the Ethernet cable and disable WiFi to prevent a sync, open Contacts, select all of my contacts and do two exports: one as a Contacts archive and the other in Vcard format.

Well, I suppose I could try that, but in normal operation I don't think I should have to do that to get it working right.

As it stands now, I have 188 Contacts on my Mac, 184 on my iPhone (I must have entered them on the phone, but I don't know how to easily get them over to the Mac). But in iCloud, there are only 67.

I'm may try to call Apple again on Monday to see if the upper level engineers can figure out the problem.

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wurm
Well, I suppose I could try that, but in normal operation I don't think I should have to do that to get it working right.

Has nothign to do with getting it working.

Has to do with having a backup in case a sync operation wipes out your contacts.

You can restore from the backups.

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Oh, I did an iTunes backup of the new phone right after i transferred everything over from my old SE. That was before I started messing around with syncing. I also did a .vcf Export of all the Contacts on my Mac. So I'm pretty sure I'm covered if I have to start from square one. At this point I'm almost more curious to see if they can tell me what's happening with them

Mine are all jacked up also; in my case, this happened when I synced my new 12 Mini to iCloud. I have double contacts for everyone in my phone's Contacts app. PITA. Wish Apple could get this right.

When I was on the phone with Apple, one of the steps she walked me through produced Duplicate contacts on my iPhone. I don't remember which exactly because our goal was to find a solution to a different problem at the time. However, A quick google search showed a lot of possible solutions, more than one of which look familiar.

[www.google.com].*

I hope you'll forgive me if you've already exercised these options. Bottom line, you're right. It should just work. The fact that there's more than a page of results indicates it's a problem that need fixing.