Missing Contacts, Notes, Events Or Emails On Apple Devices

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Do you find that suddenly you're missing some contacts, notes, or other data on your Mac. Here's what could be going on.

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So a common question I see in Support Forums is about things like missing contacts or notes or calendar events and sometimes even email messages. Now sometimes there is a simple reason for this. Let me show you. Here in Contacts you can see I've got all these different contacts listed here. But let's say one day I look and instead of this I see this. Where did all the contacts go? Well, it's probably not that you have deleted them all accidentally or somehow they disappeared. It could just be you're looking in the wrong place. The thing is Contacts App can show you contacts from different locations. What you're missing here is the left sidebar which you can turn on by going to View, Show Groups. Now Show Groups is kind of misnamed. What it should be is Show Accounts and Groups. So you can have more than one account being shown in Contacts. As a matter of fact many people do. Here you can see I've got iCloud and Goggle both being shown here. So all my contacts stored in iCloud are in the Contacts App. All my contacts stored in Goggle are in the Contacts App and I can switch between them. So I'm looking at all my Goggle contacts, just these two. But if I switch to all my iCloud contacts there is my real list. Of course you can use this to select All Contacts. 

As a matter of fact this sometimes leads to another problem which is duplicate entry.  So you can see two entries right here that are the same. A common reason for this is because one of these is in iCloud and the other is in Goggle. So you actually only have one of those entries in each of the accounts. You just happen to have that same person in two different accounts. 

A typical way to use Contacts is to decide which system you want to use, like just iCloud, and then have all of the Goggle contacts gone. If you want to move one you simply drag it and you can see how I could import that one into iCloud and then Delete it here from Goggle after I'm sure that it is over here and in iCloud. Then you only have one set of Contacts in one place. 

Now you could also be looking at a group here.  So there's All iCloud. But at some point I created a Group called Friends and I only have three in there out of the total ten or so that are here. So if I accidentally switch to show just Friends and I don't have the sidebar open it's really easy for me to think that all of those other contacts are gone when in fact all I need to do is to switch from just showing the Group to showing All of iCloud or all of Contacts. 

You have the same kind of thing on the iPhone. So here on the iPhone it looks like I just have the three contacts here. But if I tap Groups at the top you can see I can change that. I've got it just set to that Friends group and you would also see other accounts here. On this iPhone I only have iCloud setup. So you won't see Goggle there. But if I switch here to All iCloud then you could see everything is there. 

Now this also could happen with Notes. In Notes you've got the sidebar here and it's easy to actually turn it off. It's called Folders here. You can Hide/Show folders. You could simply select a folder here that only has a subset of everything. Whereas All iCloud will show all of your notes in iCloud. You can have other accounts like Goggle there. So you've got All Goggle and just various folders for Goggle. So it's easy to switch to one like this and it looks like all your notes are gone especially if you Hide folders and you don't see anything. In that case just go to View, Show Folders and then select All iCloud or All Goggle or whichever one you want. 

It's the same here in Notes on the iPhone or iPad. You can go up to All iCloud and then up beyond that to Folders. Then if you were to switch to something, including Goggle or in this case I even have On My iPhone. Anytime you see On My Mac, On My iPhone, On My iPad those are locally stored notes and contacts that are not available in any online system. So I can easily go in here and it looks like I just have these three notes. Where did everything go? But if I go up a level and then say Oh, show me All iCloud then I get back to my regular set of notes.

Calendars is similar. You should see a sidebar here that shows you your different systems. So you've got iCloud and Goggle here in my case. You may just see one or the other. You also may see On My Mac here. You also have different calendars. So I've got a bunch of appointments in here. But it's easy for me to turn off Calendar like that. Then it looks like all those events are gone. But you can easily turn it On and then see them again. If you have this Hidden by going to View, Hide Calendar List it's easy to think that those items are gone and there doesn't see to be any way to bring them back. You need to go to View and then Show Calendar List and then make sure you've checked everything you want to check and keep in mind that whatever you have selected when you create a new event it's going to be in there. So it could be easy to actually say go down here. There's no change to the calendar I've just selected this and then Add an Event and it's accidentally now in my Goggle account. Then later on when I'm just looking at my iCloud account maybe my iPhone just shows my iCloud account and I don't see it because it's in the wrong account. 

In the Calendars App on your iPhone or iPad you've got a thing that you can tap on down there and now you can see all of the different calendars and all the different accounts listed here as well. You can see it's easy to have one not checked and you won't see all those items in here. They would be missing. So you want to make sure you check here first if it seems like you're missing some calendar events. Maybe some that are on your Mac but you don't see them on your iPhone because the account isn't here or you don't have that calendar checked.  

So you can have the same kind of issue in Mail. You see in the sidebar here I've got multiple accounts and I've got different mailboxes in them. If I go to View and then Hide Sidebar it's easy not to even have that there and not to realize that you may have changed. So make sure you Show Sidebar and then you could see the different accounts and you could jump right to say an inbox at a certain account and then go to an inbox of another account and it looks empty. As a matter of fact if you leave it there and don't notice it could seem like you don't get emails at all because all your emails coming into this account instead. At the top here you usually have All Inboxes. If you expand that then you would see all the different Inboxes here and it's also easy to select one like that and then not realize that you only selected one inbox, get an email into another inbox like this one, and you'll never see it here. If you don't see All Inboxes here it could be because you removed it. So I could easily remove it like that and you can see I don't see it anymore. Click the Plus button here. Notice it only appears when you move the pointer over that space. Then you can add All Inboxes back and now it appears here. Let's move it up to the top. Now you can see it. 

It's also easy to collapse one of these like that and not see the individual mailboxes there. So if you suspect that you're missing some mail or not seeing a complete view of all your mail, make sure you have the sidebar turned on and make sure what you selected is what you really want to show here. It's easy to have the same kind of issue here on the iPhone or iPad. Here I can go up a level to Mailboxes and I can see my different accounts. I just have iCloud here. So if you get a lot of emails say with two accounts on your Mac and you notice that you're missing some email on your iPhone it could be simply you haven't added that account to your iPhone. I only have the iCloud account here. If I had multiple accounts then under Inbox I could select an individual inbox for All Inboxes and that would change what I see as well. 

Now all of these different apps have ways for you to look at the accounts that you've added. If you go into Preferences usually there's an account tab right here and you can see the different accounts. Click the Plus button to add one if you're missing one. You could also just go to  System Preferences and then look for Internet Accounts right there and then not only can you add them here by using one of these but if you look at an account like this you could see exactly what you have selected. So you can have your Goggle account added, for instance, but not have Contacts, Calendars, or Notes turned on. Then you just won't see them which can be confusing because you've added your Goggle account but maybe you don't see your Contacts. It could be because you turned it off right here. 

Also on the iPhone as well. In the Settings App you can go into Individual Settings for Contacts. You can see your accounts right there and you can add a new account. So if you're missing, say, your Goggle contacts on your iPhone but you see them on your Mac it could be because you simply haven't added that account on your iPhone.

Hopefully that gives you a greater understanding about how these apps handle multiple accounts and why sometimes it may seem like you're missing some of your data. Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.