Contacts refuse to sync

[thewhitehart]

I'm running macOS 10.13.2 and iOS 11.2.2. When I create a contact on the Mac, it refuses to sync to the iPhone. When I create a contact on the iPhone, it refuses to sync to the Mac. When I edit an existing contact on the Mac, the changes will sync to the iPhone. But when I edit an existing contact on the iPhone, the changes will not sync to the Mac.

I have tried toggling Contacts in iCloud on and off for both the iPhone and Mac. When doing so on the iPhone, I chose to delete the contacts off the iPhone. I have no local contacts on the Mac. Everything is in iCloud. I've restarted both the Mac and iPhone as well. I've also toggled Siri Suggestions. The only thing I haven't done is turn off iCloud completely; that's a massive pain in the neck that I wish to avoid if someone has a better answer.

 

[thewhitehart]

I solved the problem, and I think I know the cause. I had a problem with photos having the wrong timestamps. So I turned off automatic time zone support and automatic time setting in System Preferences to fix the problem. After turning them both back on, I seemed to have corrupted the files in ~/Library/Application Support/AddressBook. I deleted the AddressBook folder, and after restarting, force quitting, and restarting Address Book again, syncing resumed. I ended up with a bunch of no-name contacts with no-info at the bottom of my contacts list that resulted from all the test contact entries I made.

I'm glad I didn't go to the trouble of turning iCloud off and on! If you're having problems with address book syncing, be sure to back up your contacts before trying what I did, just in case.