Ok, soI’m still on the syncing experiment cycle. I decided to try to sync from Address Book.app to Gmail and Yahoo’s contacts. Not such a good idea. I mean, for backup reasons fine, it’s ok to do it once in a while, but honestly is not something I’d do on every sync. Here’s what happens:

First, you go to your Address Book, and choose Synchronize with Yahoo! and fill out your Yahoo! ID and Password, the same with Google. then a very important step is to set the Default account for new contacts: I set it on My Mac.

Before even syncing, I decided that I had all the information I needed on my MBP, so I went on and deleted everything on both the Yahoo! and Google Contacts. I wanted nothing to be lost in translation and get the different services’ labels mixed up.

After the first sync, I got everything working properly… That was easy! But… Not so fast. My Address Book is not an application I launch every day, but when I do I notice if something is off. Some of my contacts had duplicated emails or IM handles. That definitely has to be an issue with labels from each Service’s database. I ended up unchecking the options as you can see above, but now I have a backup of my address book somewhere else other than my Mac and MobileMe. Not that I’d use it much… But good to have.

The reason I use Yahoo and Google are for the IM services the first one, and the later for IM, reader, G+ and all the goodies.. including Analytics for my sites and more. Good to know I have backups of my contacts, but won’t have it synced automatically all the time.

*This scenario is for Snow Leopard, I will upgrade later on to Lion and will update this post!

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