iCloud Contacts Groups emptied...

[The_Prodigy1982]

Guys,
I could use some advice here...

I have all my contacts, sorted in individual 'groups' to be able to better sort everything (colleagues, friends, family, etc.)
Every now and then, iCloud seems to empty these groups.

• Does any1 else have this problem as well, and how to prevent iCloud from emptying these groups??
It's pretty annoying to find out all the groups (I have around 470 contacts, spread over 25 different groups) that I made over the last few months are now emptied again!!
---

- Not sure if this really IS the cause for the issue... but if I remember correctly it SEEMED to happen shortly after I have added some1 new to the contacts app, directly through my iPhone.
(I normally try and add new people ONLY via the webbrowser)

It shouldn't really matter HOW you add people in my opinion, it just needs to work if you ask me, but ok...

 

[Tartarus]

As I don’t use groups, I can’t help you.
Hopefully someone else will chime in soon.

 

[Lee_Bo]

I came across this post from Apple's support site from 2011:
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3585426

Hope it helps.

 

[alphaman64]

My wife has the exact same problem — though she probably has closer to 100 groups. Every now and then, the groups on iCloud.com will appear to be empty. I’ve tried restoring from a backup after turning off sync, and that worked. Today, I tried something else.
Logged in on her account on the Mac, I also opened up her contacts in iCloud and looked at the first empty group. I then went to the Contacts app in macOS and found the same group. I edited the group name on the Mac (as simple as adding a space or a period to the end), and waited a few seconds, et voilà, the contacts suddenly appeared in the group in iCloud. Next group, same thing.
Lather, rinse, repeat.
NB: don’t do this backwards; if you rename a group that’s empty, all your devices will get the empty group, not the one with contacts!
It appears to be a sync bug in iCloud, where the group name doesn’t line up with some other index. Changing the name forces a resync, which resolves the index problem.
This could probably be AppleScript-ed, but I can’t see a way to create a Shortcut to do it on iOS/iPadOS as Shortcuts doesn’t grok groups. It would be great if there were a way to easily resync all the groups at once.
Any ideas?