Syncing my contacts

Hello guys
I have recently bought a new I Mac and so completed my changeover to mac with my already purchased Ipod touch, Ipad, I Phone and now the desktop.
I synced my contacts from my phone sim [a UK account with '3'] together with my G Mail account and the result has been a real mess!
The G mail account is the easiest to sort out, and then I thought I would make that the account I synced everything from.
Is this a waste of time - should I start from scratch and just use the IMac as my base line, or what? And how do I make sure that the 'master' copy is not corrupted in the process of syncing?
Grateful for any advice!

Hello charliepd and welcome.

Well if you've got a new iMac with Lion OS and an iPhone with iOS5 why not clear the decks and go with the free iCloud account full sync and back-up via iTunes.

In any case syncing on Mac is 2 way so that whatever you do on one device will automatically happen on the rest. Delete, edit or add a contact in address book and it will populate the other devices with the change that you made.

Did you sync your iPhone with your new iMac first...because all your contacts should be in the Address Book application and would in fact be your 'master list' ?

Thanks

Thank you Pendlewitch
I have my allocated space on the Cloud, but have not placed anything there yet - I've only had the mac a couple of weeks nowand just managed to transfer my music.
If I follow your suggestions - which seem the best to do! - can I sync to the cloud from my Google contact list, or do you suggest I do it from the phone?
I guess which ever I use will then become the 'base' for updating and reforming?
My phone contacts are possibly the best as they have phone numbers on, but does that mean the Google ones will be corrupted and maybe lose their email addresses when I sync them in?
Thanks for your assistance!

Hi charliepd,

If you can back up the phone sim then do so. Your Google contacts should be with Google I presume?

However if you have not synced your phone with your iMac yet then I would suggest you do so (this will act as a back up also). If the Address Book is empty it will sync all contact info from your phone into it.

You should get a prompt asking you how you want to sync for the first time, or words to that effect. You will need to choose 'Merge' contacts, this will ensure that anything already on your iMac will come onto your phone and vice versa.

In my opinion you can treat both the iMac Address Book and the iPhone as your 'base' and I would then experiment with iCloud and make sure that you are happy with all the syncing before introducing another variable such as the Gmail/Google account . Once you are on iCloud you can plug your phone into the mains and it will perform a back up of all your contacts, details, calendars etc etc.

With regards to GMail yes you can sync this type of account with iCloud , but things get complicated if you change some contact information without using an iOs device as you can see in this attached link from Google support. I don't have this type of account so my advice can only stretch thus far I am afraid.

Syncing contacts between Gmail and iCloud - Gmail Help

Hope this helps
Liam

Thanks again

I'll have a go at this over the weekend Liam - thank you.
I haven't synced anything - apart from my music and therefore I Tunes- to the new pc, so will try the phone data this weeknd.
Cheers!
Peter

Personally......

I'd use gmail/google sync to sync your email/calendars/contacts. I've been doing it for years and never had an issue.

The trouble with using iCloud for contacts etc is the lack of platform independance. What is you change to an Android/Windows phone in the future?

What if Apple decide to do another MobileMe and change iCloud to something else. The upgrade path from MobileMe to iCloud has been a racky road for many (not all, granted).

At least with contacts in gmail you can export them to universal CSV and have a seperate backup even if Google decide to kill off gmail in the future.

I'm a big advocate of Apple software/hardware but in this case I believe that for Mac/PC/iPhone/iPad/online contact sync gmail offers a very robust solution.

All IMHO of course.

But the OP has just gone all in with Mac

iCloud has just hit 85 million users and that's some investment by Apple to drop it short to medium term.

He will have everything backed up on his iMac as well for portability and is able to export all his contacts from Address Book in .VCF format which is the standard file format for storing business cards and personal data and can be converted to CSV if need be.

He can still sync his Google account so it's a no brainer to me.

Thanks guys for the advice - I'm taking it step by step and have tried to update my google contacts; these I synced to my IMac and IPad, to see what happened. Seems OK but I need more time than I have! I'm working out the cloud as well thanks to your advice, so am a little happier than I was about moving my 'important' data around! Thanks again.
On another note I had successfully downloaded skype and got it running and then yeaterday it disappeared and I can't get it back even trying to re-download from Skype itself.

charliepd said:

Thanks guys for the advice - I'm taking it step by step and have tried to update my google contacts; these I synced to my IMac and IPad, to see what happened. Seems OK but I need more time than I have! I'm working out the cloud as well thanks to your advice, so am a little happier than I was about moving my 'important' data around! Thanks again.
On another note I had successfully downloaded skype and got it running and then yeaterday it disappeared and I can't get it back even trying to re-download from Skype itself.

Click to expand...

Hi charliepd,

Good to see you are progressing.

I've never downloaded Skype but you can check a couple of things. Apps don't normally disappear.

Check your Applications folder and see if there is an icon in there, if there is, drag it to the Dock at the bottom of the screen. Check your Downloads folder, it could be in there, or type Skype into the Spotlight bar top right (magnifying glass icon) to see if you can locate the folder.

Cheers