iCloud & Contacts Disappear

Português: iCloud para iOS, Mac e Windows
Image via Wikipedia

I decided to do a mass cleanup of my contacts. Being prudent, I made a backup before, and after, using the “Address Book Archive” option as we’ve been told. Then, all of the contacts disappeared. Fine, no problem, I restored from the backup. Everything looked good but a few seconds later everything was gone again. Fine, I restored from a Time Machine backup. Things went just as badly. I frantically searched for a solution and was relieved to find a post from Richard L. on MacRumours. It was an horrific experience for us to have to share. I’m posting the steps I was forced into due to this obvious near fatal bug from our dearest Apple.

1. Completely sign out of iCloud.
2. If there are somehow any remnants of your contacts in Address Book, delete them.
3. Import your “Address Book Archive File” that didn’t work for long before.
4. Make any edits and clean things up. (some were obscenely mis-alphabetized – a likely corrupted cause of the problem in the first place)
5. Drag each address book entry out of AB individually to a folder somewhere.
6. Delete everything in AB.
7. Drag the mess of vCards back into AB.
8. Log back into iCloud. (You will notice you still have contacts – that don’t sync)
9. Turn off Contacts sync in the iCloud pref pane, keeping your local contacts.
10. Turn it back on. It will kindly “merge” your contacts with iCloud.

At this point you should have a complete Address Book on your mac as well as the nicely synced data on your mac/phone/pad/pod.

Oh, Apple! It “just works,” until it doesn’t. Hopefully those good folks will fix this quite traumatic situation soon.

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Siri-ously?

I understand that Siri is still in beta, but it can still be extremely irritating how it interprets some things so oddly. I asked “How far is it from Singapore to Amsterdam” with Siri just insisting that it “cannot give directions in Singapore.” I’m sure everyone knows already, but it’s often best to prefix whatever you want to ask with “Wolfram” to increase your chances of getting some sort of sensible response. I suppose this would be much less important in the US … and have anecdotally heard that some Australians are having trouble getting the word “wolfram” itself to be recognized. <Giggle>

Before it’s suggested that SingTel has def!nd out now as a localized Siri, def!nd works fine to search for local things, but is and never was intended to be a drop-in Siri replacement despite what some deluded reporters like to put in their headlines.

iOS 5- Device Not Eligible Error

You’ve gone through the process of updating your OS X to 10.7.2, updating iTunes to 10.5, syncing, downloading iOS 5, and backing up, but after all that clicking and waiting you find that “this device is not eligible for the requested build.”

The culprit would seem to be a now problematic entry in /etc/hosts. Namely, a single line at the end:

74.208.10.249   gs.apple.com

Well, this line is not in a pristine hosts file and should be removed or commented out. By removed, I mean delete it. By commented out, I mean modify the line to read only:

#74.208.10.249   gs.apple.com

Of course, you cannot edit the file in place, so copy it, and perhaps a backup (how about “/etc/hosts.orig”) somewhere to edit, then copy that back to the original place – all as an admin user.

Reboot. Rebackup. Rejoice.