Merging contacts into iCloud

[dancurry]

I have lots of contacts in both iCloud and FastMail. I want to consolidate all of them into iCloud. About 80 to 90 percent of them are in both services. What is the best way to go about this task?

 

[posguy99]

What you really should do is consolidate them all into Fastmail, which is a service that obeys standards (CardDAV) and is much more reliable than iCloud can ever hope to be.

My contacts and calendar are much too important to trust to iCloud. When I abandoned iCloud, I used BusyContacts and migrated everything over (and cleaned up all the junk too) in a couple hours. I configured both contacts sources and then could drag-and-drop as I liked between them.

 

[Apple_Robert]

I would log into iCloud and add the contacts that are missing. That should get you a good set of backed up contacts.

 

[dancurry]

Regardless of which service I keep, I want to use either Fastmail or iCloud only. How do I go about this when a large portion of them are dupes.

 

[Apple_Robert]

Regardless of which service I keep, I want to use either Fastmail or iCloud only. How do I go about this when a large portion of them are dupes.

If you log into iCloud.com > contacts and see a lot of duplicates, you will have to manually delete the duplicates.

 

[hg.wells]

If you have a Mac and use the Contacts app you can then use the "Look for Duplicates..." feature and merge duplicate contacts.

Found under the Card menu: