Restore contacts from a specific backup? via iCloud

jimbling

Hey guys, I have a bit of a problem. Here's the background:

I had an iPad and iPhone that had synced contacts between them via iCloud.

While I was away recently my iPhone was stolen. During the few hours before I got the sim shut down and the phone blacklisted, the thief managed to delete my contacts and back it up to the cloud somehow. This then overwrote my contacts on my iPad also.

So, now I am looking for a way to get my previous contacts back.
Since i know my iPad has not been backed up since prior to this time (due to space problems) I was hoping that the contacts would be within the last iPad backup?
How can I extract these? Do I need to restore the whole thing?
I might also have hard backups from before the days of the cloud that would have my contacts as well, is there software that can extract the contacts from one of these if I can locate it?

All advice welcome....

guil

If you have the backup on a pc you can get the contacts. I posted how to do it a few months ago. I'll try find the post

jimbling

When I went to 'restore from backup' just now, I was delighted to discover that here was older backups on the cloud. From before the theft.
So, I restored the iPhone from that. Everything worked perfectly, but contacts were still the wrong ones (i.e. thiefs contacts)

How is this possible?

The only way I can see it is that the contacts are updated after the restore from the most recent one on the cloud? There must be a way around this??
Help!!!!

Sad Professor

That was one dumb thief. You could easily have tracked him down, even if you hadn't got Find My iPhone enabled.

Make sure you change your Apple ID password in case he's still using it with your account. Otherwise iCloud will continue to sync any changes.

jimbling

I am assuming the thief sold on the iPhone pretty quickly.

What I only discovered the other day is that Blacklisting the phone does not stop my accounts use. For some reason I thought it actually meant the phone could no longer be used (it does, but only the phone capabilities, everything else still works).

Thankfully whoever had use of my account didn't do anything with it other than overwrite my contacts.... no purchasing of apps etc.

I have changed the password and also requested the phone be wiped through find my iPhone.

jimbling

I did manage to retrieve my contacts, but only due to the fact that I had a hard backup of my iPhone on my old computer from before the days of the cloud.


Everyone beware. Cloud backups are not very useful for situations like this. They are iterative backups, meaning even if you can see 3 iPhone backups, the oldest will still contain the most recent contacts.
e.g. I had a backup dated 28 Apr 2012. This backup still contained the contacts that the thief had updated on 9 May 2012.

Not really sure about the system, but I know I'm going to start backing up locally to my machine every now and again in order to get around this.