Do you ever experience the problem of looking for someone you know you’ve added as a “contact”, but does not appear in your Address Book or in your Contacts because s/he was added using some other tool? With various third-party tools that offer to help you keep track of and get access to your contacts why does it seem that there is no way to maintain a unified database?

If the standard filetype is the Vcard, why would not all these tools have similar access to anything of that filetype and keep them in one database?

Is there something I’m missing?

And, yes, Google is my friend, so I looked here, but it doesn’t seem to answer my question:

https://www.google.com/search?q=manage+multiple+contact+databases+macintosh&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a

…and this:

https://www.macupdate.com/find/mac/contact%20management

I’ve been using Cobook for a number of months on my Mac and recently downloaded the iPhone version.

I noticed today that there is at least one (if I had the time I might be able to confirm “a number”) contact that appears in Cobook, but not in Address Book on my Mac, nor does that particular contact appear in my Contacts app on my iPhone, nor in Cobook on the iPhone.

Can you explain how I can make sure all contacts appear in each of these? I thought they were all supposed to be drawing from the same internal database.

I have been told:
Contacts have multiple data sources not just one so there may be several reasons why it appears like that. First of all on Mac you can connect Xing, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter on iPhone on the other hand you can connect just Facebook and Twitter as additional sources. As the main source you on iPhone can connect multiple AddressBooks on the Mac currently just one. For one iCloud account on Mac and iPhone it should have the same contacts but as i said that’s not the only possible data source.

There is no automated process for combining data sources.

If you need contact on iCloud you can go to contacts one-by-one and copy them to iCloud when contact details are opened.