Contacts Issue

[aatakan]

So recently I connected all my Apple devices to iCloud including one that had a very old set of contacts on it, I didn't realise but these old contacts then proceded to replace the contacts on all my devices which was quite annoying.

Fortunately i still have one device not connected which has all my new contacts on it, but I am scared to sync it to the Cloud as I fear the old contacts might overwrite the new ones instead of the other way round. Another option which i tried was i synced the new contacts to my iMac to the Address Book and then I went to sync my current iPhone with my iMac checking the option which replaces the contacts on the phone with the contacts currently in Address Book, it finished the sync and I still had no contacts on my phone.

I then went to try spotlight search on my iPhone and when I searched a phrase it came up with text messages which included the phrase with the names of the contacts! this confused me and i decided to restart my iPhone but i still have no contacts in the contacts or phone app and when i go into Messages app all of them appear as just numbers, but when i search in spotlight people's names come up. Does anyone know how I can fix this issue? I am using an iPhone 4

Thanks guys!
Aydin

 

[Slip Jigs]

I wish I old answer your question, but I've never been able to figure out how the sync determines between the devices which contact record is the most recent. A common sense guess would be that each device maintains an index that contains a timestamp indicating when a record on the device was last modified. If it does, we can't see or verify this.

To be safe, I would restore the device as new, then sync to iCloud - then on first sync you can choose to have iCloud replace all data on the device. Then after that, sync as usual.

Once everything is set up and verified, choose a device to use as a master, and back it up, and create a copy of the backup files. ICloud will serve as your master backp, but a device backup will provide an additional one.