Help me understand iPhone / iTunes / iCloud

Factual Questions
1

I’ll try to be brief:

The wife and I each got an iPhone. We each have our own laptop with iTunes installed with our own Apple accounts and our own music.

When she synced her contacts from her old phone to the new, it automatically merged both of our phone contacts list together.

I fixed this by shutting off iCloud within my iPhone, then manually deleted her contacts from my list.

Now I’d like to do some things that iCloud requires, but I’m a-scared to turn it back on because the two contact lists will likely merge again.

Any suggestions?

Thanks!
mmm

2

You need two separate iCloud accounts.

3

Is the laptop a Windows laptop or a Mac laptop? Do you use the same OS login when you use the laptop, or different OS logins?

As Mojo the Monkey says, you will need at least two separate iCloud accounts.

4

Thanks for the replies.

One laptop is a PC, the other a Mac.

I’m almost positive we have two separate iCloud accounts; I will check into that.
mmm

5

Settings->iCloud->contacts, and you can make sure that the two contact lists aren’t synced. Or, you can set up two different iCloud accounts, so her phone will be synced with her devices, and your phone with yours.

6

Can I piggyback another iCloud related question?

After some syncing I ended up with several duplicate contacts in iCloud that were too many to manually delete. I tried to find some way to merge them but I couldn’t.

Eventually, I exported the contacts to my gmail account which can merge duplicates, deleted everything on iCloud and iPhone and re-imported them from gmail to iCloud.

I am sure there must be a more straightforward way to do it.

7

When I go to Settings>iCloud>Contacts, there is simply an on/off toggle. I shut this off after I discovered the merged contacts problem.

So…OFF and I can’t use iCloud. ON and the two lists merge.

How within Settings>iCloud>Contacts can I solve the problem?

Thanks