iPhone deleted my contacts

intellectual dosser

I discovered yesterday that all my contacts on my iPhone have been erased. My call history and text messages are still there but instead of showing who its from it just gives the number. I cant think of any reason why this happened, I wasn't messing about with the settings and I wasn't using any apps/websites that I haven't used frequently in the past.

Naturally all the advice online is to recover from a backup, my problem is that my backup is on a laptop that recently lost its battle for life, so I'm stranded.

If anyone has any tips I'd very much appreciate it. Even knowing root cause would prevent me doing it again in future.

guil

What iPhone is it and had you got iCloud and iCloud backup turned on?

Take the hard drive out of the busted laptop and put in in an enclosure to get the backup from it.

intellectual dosser

Thanks Guil I think thats the only option. Its an iPhone 4, and of course I dont have iCloud because that would have been the smart thing to do.

Lessons learned I guess.

Gumbo

Go to :

1. Contacts
2. Top left corner and click on Groups.
3. See if any are ticked, if none are tick some and see if your contacts are simply turned off.

Sarn

This has been happening a lot to people on iOS 5.1.1. Happened to me last month and my brother a few days later.

Lost contacts

intellectual dosser

kceire wrote: »

Go to :

1. Contacts
2. Top left corner and click on Groups.
3. See if any are ticked, if none are tick some and see if your contacts are simply turned off.

When I'm in contacts the Groups button isnt there, probably because I have no numbers. Even all my messages are from 'numbers' instead of contacts, I think they're just gone. Thanks for the suggestion though.

Sarn wrote: »

This has been happening a lot to people on iOS 5.1.1. Happened to me last month and my brother a few days later.

Lost contacts

I'm on 5.1.1 too and Safari kept crashing repeatedly on me on Monday morning. Knowing that its a wider problem actually made me feel better, thanks


I'll get the crash cart out for my laptop this evening - sounds like my only chance - thanks all for the input.

seanin98

The same thing happened to me on Monday so i went in and manually input all the contacts that i had from an old phone. This morning they were all gone again so don't waste too much time doing this.

I synced my phone to my laptop a while back .. is it an easy process to then get the contacts back from my laptop?

Piliger

Have you rebooted your iPhone ? and I mean reboot ... not just turn it off and on (Sleep mode) but a hard reset ?

seanin98

Rebooting didn't work. I was able to retrieve all the numbers that i saved to my SIM but unfortuntely any numbers i'd got in the past few years were not on the SIM.

I manually updated all the one's that I could figure out the contacts from reading old texts.

Another thing i realised is that while i was syncing my phone every few months i hadn't ticked the box to update my contacts to outlook so the sync was not saving my contacts. Bit of a bummer but what can you do.

sillymoo

This also happened to me ages ago, I think I started a thread on it at the time. I never figured out how to get them back so just figured out which numbers were which from text messages I had received.

intellectual dosser

I wasn't able to revive my laptop outside of taking the harddrive out. I too have gone down the path of looking at messages at figuring out who's who - I'm not as bummed about it as I was initially - I have all of the people I be in contact with regularly.

120_Minutes

i've heard of this happening a lot, common factor seems to be ios 6.1 or higher.....coincidence?

Sad Professor

I don't think it's a problem with iOS. People have been complaining about their contacts being deleted since forever. It happens during iTunes sync. Depending on how you sync your contacts there's lots of potential for conflict, especially on Windows.

I would generally recommend against syncing contacts with anything other than iCloud.

Sarn

I would have to disagree. The frequency of this happening appears to have increased significantly over a very short period of time. I have never synced my contacts with iTunes (inadvertently). Plus reports of people who have not synced with iTunes for extended periods have had this happen.

Piliger

Sad Professor wrote: »

I don't think it's a problem with iOS. People have been complaining about their contacts being deleted since forever. It happens during iTunes sync. Depending on how you sync your contacts there's lots of potential for conflict, especially on Windows.

Indeed. The idea that it is an iOS problem is just silly. Usually it turns out to be caused by people not paying attention to the settings and alerts before and during sync.

I would generally recommend against syncing contacts with anything other than iCloud.

I would not agree, I would suggest people pay more attention.