"On My Mac" for Contacts

In the discussion on, How best to retire an email account? I liked webwalrus’ suggestion to use the On My Mac “account” in Mail. " just make a local folder in the “On My Mac” section and move all the messages there." I thought I would apply the same notion to my Contacts, but I don’t have/can’t figure out how to get an On My Mac account/group. I think I remember having one! Does anyone have a suggestion?

I’ve “archived” contacts in the past by selecting the ones I want to remove in the Contacts app then:

  1. Exporting them as a PDF and
  2. Exporting them as a VCard.

This allows me to look up addresses when necessary in the PDF or import them back into Contacts should that become necessary.

If there is a possibility you may need to reference the old mail and/or contacts from time to time you may want to create an archive user account on your Mac and keep everything in that account.

Good suggestions… thank you.

I found some Apple support discussions from several years back that referenced On My Mac for Contacts, but I am not sure that feature exists in macOS 12??

I just discovered On My Mac appears if you turn off iCloud Contacts. But it disappears again and any contacts your put into a local account are imported info iCloud Contacts as soon as you turn it back on,

That is weird… thanks.