Disaster that is Contacts

[malaresetting]

Yet again, I'm deleting all contacts from my iPhone and trying to reinstal the ones on my Mac (Air, Yosemite, iPhone 3GS) from iCloud. Yet again the whole business is hideously hinky.

This time there's an added pleasure. I have a contact - let's call her John Smith - on both phone and Mac. The Mac has more information, which I'd like to show on the phone.

On the phone, if I search for her name - either John or Smith - it comes up (though with the minimal contact details I entered on the phone when we first met). But if I look for her in the address book's list under Smith, I'll find James Smith, Jinx Smith, Joseph Smith, but no John Smith.

I can probably find a workaround - delete the contact on the iPhone and then delete all contacts, turn the phone off, turn it on again, dance three times around the magic circle, turn contacts on again…

But why is Apple's address book so awful? And why can't you have simple, user-friendly, old-fashioned-Mac-style things like a Sync button and text that you can change the size of so you can read the information in the first place?

----------

(Note, it didn't work. Poor John Smith's address is on the Mac, but not on the iPhone now. And lacking a 'Sync' button, I don't know how to transfer it. Is there any way to go back to syncing through iTunes, which worked?)

I tried sending a Vcard to myself as an SMS, and managed to force the iPhone contacts list to accept John Smith's address that way - but I don't want to have to do this with every contact I change.

 

[malaresetting]

Further to this, I deleted all the contacts from the iPhone, turned it off, turned it on again, reloaded the contacts.
As a result of this, the Mac now has two sets of contacts - it has reloaded all the contacts again, from an old version, so that I now have contacts for individuals with their old address before they moved, and other contacts with their new address, and contacts that had been deleted have reappeared.
Looking to see how to get rid of the duplicates I see the chilling line "review the results". These are my home and work contacts; there are thousands.

 

[simonsi]

Reloaded them from an old version of what?

 

[malaresetting]

From an old version of the address book. For example, I have a friend who's moved from one side of Galway to the other. I now have his correct address on one 'contact' card, and his old address on another, side-by-side in the Mac Contacts app. I assume that this is duplicated on many of the thousands of addresses.

 

[simonsi]

Do you have a backup? Time Machine? Where did the "old version of the address" book come from?

 

[malaresetting]

Do you have a backup? Time Machine? Where did the "old version of the address" book come from?

I have Time Machine, but didn't reload contacts from it. They just somehow suddenly appeared on the Mac - duplicates, including deleted contacts, old addresses.

I'm going to see if I can change the connection between computer and phone to iTunes, which used to work reliably. This just seems to be one of the functions that iCloud doesn't do well.