Contacts - how often do you clear them out?

Software
6

We moved about 2 years ago and I took that opportunity to purge my contacts (which numbered around 1800-2000, I think) of everyone except immediate family and a few close friends.

Two years later, I have about 300. That number is inflated somewhat because I have all of the active members of my congregation in there for caller-ID purposes, in addition to being able to call them without referring to the church’s printed directory of names and numbers.

I run a script¹ every night which saves each contact as individual vCards to a specific folder in Dropbox.

Since I have that “archive” I am fairly quick to delete a contact that I no longer think that I need, because if I ever change my mind, I can go into that folder, double-click on the vCard, and re-add it to my contacts.

(The script does not delete vCards, only exports them, so if I delete someone from my contacts, their vCard will still be in the archive.)

I will especially do that if the name confuses Siri when I try to call someone using by name, but it also makes it much easier to find someone’s email when composing a new message if you only have contacts you actually contact.

¹ Here’s the script. I copied it almost entirely from another forum post at some time in the past. If you change the $DIR variable, be sure to change the set vPath line too.

#!/bin/zsh -f 

DIR="$HOME/Dropbox/Backups/vCards"

[[ ! -d "$DIR" ]] && mkdir -p "$DIR"

# Don't Indent - BEGIN
/usr/bin/osascript <<EOT
set vPath to (path to the home folder as string) & "Dropbox:Backups:vCards"
alias vPath

tell application "Contacts"
	repeat with cardPerson in people
		set nameOfvCard to name of cardPerson & ".vcf"
		set outFile to (open for access file (vPath & ":" & nameOfvCard) with write permission)
		write (vcard of cardPerson as text) to outFile
		close access outFile
	end repeat
	quit
end tell
EOT
# Don't Indent - END
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