A dear family member upgraded their old Mac Mini to a new Mac Mini over the holiday break and from afar, I helped by making some key suggestions on how to get the data moved from the old machine to the new machine. Specifically, using Apple’s own Time Machine to restore the data back to where it belonged on the new computer. I did this through another person, by fielding technical questions from remote.

Everything appeared to go well, except Contacts was a problem. But after a few restarts, Contacts wasn’t a problem. So everything was fine and we moved on. Then I got a new call for help, that the Contacts application had crashed and refused to restart. I started my remote assistance program and shared the desktop session with the faraway computer. The Contacts app was well and truly not opening. I went to ~/Library/Application Support/AddressBook and moved the folder to the Desktop, started Contacts app, and it started with the owners details and the entry for Apple. Then I closed the Contacts app, deleted the AddressBook folder that was created by default because I had moved the previous one to the Desktop, and I undid that. I then started Contacts and it opened. The user went to an entry they wanted to remove, and the app crashed. And then it was stuck again. I did the AddressBook folder out/delete/in two-step and got it back to work, but then figured out that some of the entries worked fine, while others caused the application to crash.

So after I got everything back and running in Contacts, I backed up the contacts using the Export Contacts feature. I then emptied the AddressBook folder again, started Contacts, and then Imported from the backup. Once again, the entry that was causing the crash made the application crash. So whatever it was, it was data driven and somehow got included in the backup feature. I had another option, a long shot, but I tried it. So I got everything in Contacts up and running, selected everything, saved everything as a VCARD file instead, then used TextEdit to find the entry that the end user really didn’t want and removed it manually. Then I restarted an empty version of Contacts, which ran fine, imported the VCARD data back into Contacts, and then after that, everything was fine.

So there is something from probably High Sierra’s Contacts that drives Catalina’s Contacts nuts. Its something that survives backups, but doesn’t survive being shuttled through VCARD. If you have any problems with toxic entries causing Contacts to crash, select all the cards, export them as VCARD, empty out ~/Library/Application Support/AddressBook and then reimport everything. It works. I don’t know why, but it works.

This is the sort of foolishness that I expect from Microsoft, not Apple. Tsk Tsk Tsk Apple.