I had some serious issues with my Google Contacts yesterday. Duplicates, triplicates, quadruplicates, quintuplicates, by the Gods, even unto decuplicates there were. Moreover, those that had been cloned were not truly cloned, but merged, munged, and otherwise spliced together with other contact entries in the most perplexing and mystifying (to say nothing of frustrating) ways.

To paint an unfortunately inadequate picture… this phone number was placed with that name and another address entirely. That address was truncated and duplicated within the same (but wrong) contact several times over. That name was repeated across a dozen entries, many duplicates, but others different in subtle and aggravating ways. The deeper I dug into it, the more baffled and dejected I became. What had happened? There was no rhyme! There was no reason! There was only chaos where before had been beautiful order!

I feared the damage was irreversible, and for one who has taken some measure of pride in a complete and accurate address book (a consequence of the wedding planning), this was sore news indeed. I steeled myself for hours, days, weeks and even months of corrective work.

From about 6:30pm until 10:00pm, I worked. My first step was to stop the hemorrhaging. I uninstalled Google Sync, which I use to sync contacts and calendar entries between my Blackberry and my Google account. Having become rid of that, I moved to erase my entire BB address book using the Desktop Manager (the easiest way to accomplish the task short of wiping the BB entirely). Curiously, it wouldn’t let me b/c it was set for wireless synchronization. Navigating to the proper screen, I found that it was! Dismay! Moreover, it was set to allow duplicates! Horror! I disabled duplicates forthwith, and shut off wireless synchronization with a strong exclamation point (or “bang” if you will). Thus eliminating the possibility of additional corruption, I moved to my Google Contacts list.

The tedium begins. The immediately obvious saving grace, and clear starting point was the fact that the illegimate entries did not belong to any existing group (other than the All Contacts group). I always assign my contacts to a group (it’s a geeky organizational thing). This made it easy to identify and trim those contacts that weren’t present prior to the Google Contact Screw 2010. But my work was only beginning. While I had fewer contacts to correct, the corruption, and thus the correction, was egregious. So I commenced.

I removed the obvious duplicates. I eliminated duplicate street address entries. I recreated destroyed address entries. I moved e’mail addresses and phone numbers to their correct place. I cross referenced with my guest book listing from the wedding, and from old exports of years gone by. I spent the better part of two hours fixing the obvious errors. I did what I could to bring my contact list back from chaos and into some semblance of order. I can’t say with any degree of certainty that it’s error free now, but I think it’s close. It’ll take months, I’m sure, to weed out all the errors, especially for those contacts not contacted that much, but I’m off to a good start.

Having cleaned it up as best I could, I reinstalled Google Sync and enabled only the Calendar sync portion. Having confirmed that my calendar entries were syncing properly, I enabled native wireless syncing for my address book, making sure to disallow duplicates.

So far, so good.

Here’s what I think happened… I think for reasons still wholly unclear, that the native wireless contact sync and the Google Sync contact sync suddenly started attacking each other. In their struggle, contacts were corrupted, destroyed, duplicated and otherwise rendered unrecognizable. For reasons also still wholly unclear, I think this fight started b/c the native wireless syncing was enabled, having been previously disabled, and that duplicates were, by default, allowed.

The result was that my contact list was damaged nearly to the point of no return.

I’m not the only person to have had this problem, though… and if I follow through with some research, I may find another culprit. I’m certainly open to the truth if it differs from my own theory.

I’m not sure which I would rather… disable native address book syncing and enable Google Sync, or enable native syncing and disable Google Sync. I think, for the time being, I will enable native syncing and monitor for a reset to the apparently default “Allow Duplicates.”

My next task will be to find a way to automatically, likely via cron, perform daily exports of my address book so that, in the event that this happens again, I will have a backup to restore from. So far, python looks to be the most likely candidate, given the Google Contacts API.