MacOS – How to download iCloud Address book to Mac

You can set up multiple different iCloud accounts in the "Mail, Contacts, and Calendars" preference panel, and also on your iPhone and iPads.

I have accomplished a shared address book with my partner by each of us having a primary iCloud account (me@us.com, her@us.com) - and then a shared iCould account us@us.com.

One annoying downside is that the Lion Address Book app labels both address books as "iCloud" making it a bit hard to distinguish what contacts are where. We solve this by having different contact lists in each address book, so they are distinct.

It seems with just a little bit of work Apple could make this MUCH better, but this is the best solution I have seen so far.

I was attempting to work out a bug with iTunes. iTunes was refusing to put my contacts on my new iPod. And no groups were showing in iTunes.

One thing led to another, and I found myself looking at a blank address book. You can imagine my consternation when my iPhone contacts got smoked before I could shut down a sync.

I could import from my backups, but, like the original poster, the contacts would appear for about a second before disappearing again.

Shutting down the contacts iCloud sync and then logging out of iCloud worked. I was then able to import either one of my two backups without issue.