iCloud Contacts out of sync

[srbNYC]

I noticed something odd yesterday: A random person in a group chat was identified on my Mac, and just listed as a number on my iPhone. Turns out, I have a different quantity of iCloud contacts on different platforms. 4,068 on my Mac, and 3,974 on my iPhone, and 4,019 on iCloud on the web.

I've tried turning off Contacts sync in iCloud settings on both my MacBook and my iPhone, and the stats are the same. There's no way I can actually compare to see what's different or to pinpoint the 94 contacts in question.

Has anyone encountered this? Can anyone suggest how to fix it?

 

[bob_zz123]

Probably not an easy one to fix, and notwithstanding your (understadable) reluctance to want to check every one, there's unlikely to be any way of doing it rather than a direct comparison between the three lists because you're the only person who knows which contacts there should be, the computer doesn't know. One might assume that the 4,068 on the Mac is the "definitive" list as it's the largest but it might not be, there might be newer ones on the iPhone that are of sync with the Mac.

If you could get a set of three lists what I would do is put it into Excel and do some magic to compare the differences between the three. That would be easy to do on the Mac by doing select all / copy in Contacts and Paste in Excel and probably possible using the Web version as well but obviously a difficult thing to do on the iPhone.

If you were happy to accept that the 4,068 on the Mac is the definitive list (and didn't want to check every one on every device) then you could also export that Contacts list to an archive, then delete all contacts from the Mac and see if that syncs to other devices, and once every device is back at 0, re-import the archive to the Mac, get your 4,068 back and then see if that syncs out OK.