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Duplicated birthdays reflecting many contacts "on my Mac" as well as in iCloud

I generally rely on iCloud for storing contact and event information, and it's very good on iPhone, iPad and Mac. HOWEVER, probably as a legacy of something that went wrong in the past, the Contacts app on my Mac refers BOTH to my iCloud account AND to "On My Mac". Thus if I opt to show 'All Contacts' almost every contact is duplicated. I can work around this problem in the Contacts app by opting to show only iCloud. But the Calendar app picks up birthdays from both sources, and I think this is the reason why I cannot prevent birthdays from being duplicated in the calendar.


The standard Mac OS procedure for removing duplicates doesn't seem to find identical contact records that are in both iCloud and "On my Mac".


I think that I need to remove (or at least hide) all the contacts records that are still in "on my Mac". How do I do this safely? "On my Mac" doesn't seem to be an "account" that can be deleted or hidden.

MacBook Pro 13″, macOS 11.4

Posted on Jul 23, 2021 7:54 AM

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Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Posted on Jul 24, 2021 10:05 AM

Hey Robert_Shi,


It sounds like you're wanting to remove contacts from the "On My Mac" Section in Contacts. We can understand wanting to look into that further. We want to help.


You'll want to manually delete any duplicate contacts. This article explains how: Delete contacts in Contacts on Mac


Thanks!

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2 replies

Jul 25, 2021 10:35 AM in response to mario49

OK - I took a deep breath and did it: I selected all 1,800 contacts in "On My Mac" and deleted them. I also deleted all the groups that were under "On My Mac". Then the On My Mac section disappeared from the LHS of the Contacts list. (Sensible, because it would have been empty).

Now I only have iCloud - which is absolutely fine because everything is there.

No more duplications anywhere!

Many thanks

Duplicated birthdays reflecting many contacts "on my Mac" as well as in iCloud

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