Windows 10: Linking phone to PC creates duplicate contacts

Why does linking my android phone to my PC create duplicate contacts?

:)

 

Single Outlook.com contact with duplicated linked source on Windows Phone - How to fix

I have a Lumia 920 and use a Microsoft Outlook.com email account to sync and store my contacts. I have over 200 contacts attached to this account.

Windows Phone is creating phantom duplicate contacts that don't appear to be deleteable. This doesn't occur for every contact, but consistently happens to contacts I have edited on my phone. If I edit the contact at Outlook.com, use the Outlook desktop
app, or use the Windows People app no problem, no duplicates. If I edit the contact on my phone, Windows Phone creates a phantom duplicate that does not show up in my contact list.

If I login to Outlook.com, each of my 200+ contacts are listed just 1 time, none are duplicated.

On my phone, I have the exact same count of contacts, none are duplicated.

The problem I am running into appears to be a Windows Phone bug. In Windows Phone you can link multiple contact sources; e.g. different email accounts, Facebook, combining business and personal contacts into a single contact, etc. That is working just
fine.

The bug is that some of my Outlook.com contacts are "marked as" linked but it is an error, as they are not linked. For a real linked contact, there is an icon at the bottom of the contact indicating the link along with a numeral inside the icon for how
many different contact sources are linked. When you click that icon, a list of the multiple sources is shown and you can modify it, adding or removing sources.

For the buggy contacts, that list duplicates a SINGLE source, my outlook.com email account. I can unlink the duplicated contact source. Even then there is still a SINGLE instance of the contact in my contact list. Yet, if I go back to edit the links for
that contact it is showing up twice since it is being duplicated.

If I have the duplicated contact sources linked, upon editing the contact I am prompted to choose a source from the list. Of course the list has the same source entered multiple times.

Here is the root problem, if I edit the contact, I am editing only ONE of the duplicated sources. Only one of the duplicates actually syncs with the Outlook.com cloud server, yet since they are identical there is no way for me to know which one is correct.
If I unlink the duplicated source, I can only edit the contact on my phone, it does NOT sync to the Outlook.com cloud server. Therefore I MUST keep the phantom contact linked, as it is the phantom source that syncs to the server, not the contact listed in
my contact list.

This is highly irritating as I have to make my edits twice to be sure the updates sync to the server. Also, once a contact has a phantom duplicate, modifying the contact on Outlook.com will only update the phantom contact, as only that instance syncs to
the server. Thus, I end up with duplicated entries for contacts, 1 old and 1 new. If it is a phone number I won't remember which is which, so I'll have to call both to figure it out.

This occurs across multiple Windows devices and multiple people's Outlook.com email accounts. This is not limited to me, and it is not a problem just on my device.

How do I get rid of these phantom duplicated contacts?

 

Links for imported contact being duplicated - why?

Verizon successfully copied my basic cell phone contact info to my HTC Windows Phone 8 and my Hotmail account seems to be successfully linked. But for many of my contacts, there are 5 and 6 "links" for each contact with the same info. I just pulled my
Outlook contacts into my Hotmail contact list and the same thing seems to be happening . . . Where are the links coming from? I've used the "manage" contacts tab to clean up duplicates and Hotmail (or Windows Live or Outlook.com or whatever is managing all
this in the cloud) doesn't see these as duplicate contacts. It says there are no duplicates.

Many thanks for any insight into what's happening.

 

Duplicate Contacts.. which ones to delete?

from the link above

Clean up duplicate contacts at Outlook – free personal email and calendar from Microsoft

You can combine duplicate contacts into a single one with all the contact info.

Use “Clean up contacts”

• 
  In People, click Manage, then click Clean up contacts.
  
• 
  Within each contact set, clear the check box for any contact you don’t want in the set.
  
• 
  Repeat step 2 for all contact sets, and then click Clean up.
  

Search and combine manually

• 
  In the People search field, type the name of the contact you’re looking for.
  
• 
  In the search result, select the contacts you want to combine, and then click
  Link.
  

Undo a combined contact
When a new combined contact is created, the original duplicate contacts are then deleted. If you accidentally combine two or more contacts that are actually different people, here’s how to restore them.

• 
  In People, click Manage, and then Restore deleted contacts.
  
• 
  Select the original contacts you want to restore, then click Restore.
  
• 
  Click the incorrectly-combined contact, click Delete, then click
  Delete again.