iPhone Contacts Disappear - Solution

[howsbentley]

I checked the forum and didn't see a clear post about a solution to this problem. Sorry if this is a duplicate of earlier information.

Problem: I open Contacts on the iPhone and no contacts are listed. It's as if I have never entered any contacts. I check MM Cloud and Address Book (on iMac) and the contacts are still intact.

The first time it happened I fiddled around and they eventually reappeared. Since then it's happened several times and usually they reappear after a short or long period. I reboot, turn contacts on / off and after several combinations, I finally lucked into this solution to get them back immediately.

Here's the solution.
on iPhone, go to Settings > Mail,Contacts, Calendars and select your Mobil Me mail account.
Slide the "Contacts" toggle into the off position. A message will come up "Synced contacts will be removed from your iPhone".
Select 'Stop Syncing' message will state something to the effect "Removing contacts"
Hard boot the iPhone.
After restart, open mail program and send a message via Mobil Me account.
Open Contacts and hooray- they're back!


AT

[hooly]

This just happened to me.

Contacts are visible on both my computers but not on my iphone. it has worked fine until now.

trying your instructions...

[hooly]

yup turning contacts off and on again worked, but it pretty scary and i would prefer it not to happen ! :eek:

[Timber910]

Hello all, this has just started on my phone. I entered a number in my phone on Tuesday and Monday this week. Phone number is gone the next day. I tried the un-sync and sync with the mobileMe account. And it didn't bring back the 1 phone number I had entered. Any other ideas? I can't find anything on Apple's website that this bug has been fixed as of yet. Help...:confused::mad::(

[ec51]

I have an idea, turn off mobile me syncing for your contacts and LEAVE it off. Syncing mobile me contacts also removes custom ringtones and reverts them back to default. YAY MM.

[scowls]

I just stumbled on this interaction. I've had this problem occur on multiple occasions over the past year. Last summer it happened regularly and in one case the addresses were missing from the iPhone for 5 days while I was on vacation. The only phone numbers that remained were my favorites (with no names, but only the phone numbers) and any phone numbers that I'd copied into an iCal entry (the calendar seems immune to the problem). I have reported this on Apple's feedback page (http://www.apple.com/feedback/) as a bug report on 4 or 5 occasions over the past year.

It happened again last Friday and again last night as I was trying to reach someone I was supposed to meet. The addresses seem to return more quickly now than they did last summer - last night they came back within the hour, but way too late for meeting my friend. Today I turned off MobileMe for my address book and returned to hard syncing. I might bite the bullet again and go back to mobile me to try your solution. Unfortunately the problem isn't reproducible on command, so there's no way to test it in a safe environment.

I encourage people to report this to Apple when it happens to them. I understand there is a developer feedback page and perhaps this gets more attention? Hopefully with enough complaining Apple will figure out how to solve this disturbing and critical problem. Clearly it is solvable, given the calendar is stable....

[J333bus]

Hi guys,

A couple of my contacts started randomly disappearing this morning, even after I rebooted my iPhone 3GS and added the contact again. Since I don't use mobileme, I was stumped. I have a mix of SIM contacts and Gmail contacts, synced through the Exchange Calendar option for Gmail.

So I went into Mail, Contacts, Calendars and chose to "Import SIM Contacts" into the default contacts location. It took a while (c. 5 mins) but it seems to have worked, as all of my previously deleted contacts have returned.

Hope this helps!

[go.mouse]

My MobileMe has stopped syncing with my iPhone today. Had a lengthy Live Chat with 2 Apple support reps and we were unable to figure out a solution.

We tried removing the MobileMe account on the iPhone and removing all contacts and calendar entries from the iPhone, then try to sync data from the cloud. It just would not work, even with their test MobileMe account. Iphone gets zero entries from the cloud.

The senior support rep said that he will get back to me within 48 hours on this.

[Skookum1]

Reading through the various responses here has given me SOME hope - I don't have MobileMe, though I was about to sign up for the 60day demo after installing "Find my iPhone" after losing it last weekend and it being miraculously returned....right after I upgraded to 4.0 which was what was offered at the time; now my provider (Fido in Canada) tells me that it's buggy and there's 4.0.1.....yeah it's been freezing and doing other odd things....including tonight losing my contacts.

First they disappeared from SMS and I dropped by the phonebook to see if they ewre there, yup they were; but not soon had I gone to "recents" then poof they were gone; I've tried restarting and resetting the phone (holding down both wake/home buttons etc) but nope nope nope. I started gritting my teethy when Fido told me they couldn't help me, because if it involved a restore process in iTunes then I'd have to talk to Apple, and Apple....well, Apple would probably charge me for the privilege of my having to waste more time trying to recover my contacts which their wonderful software had lost for me....

I WAS going to try a restore off last week's backup, when I upgraded to 4.0, but simply needed to know where in my iMac the backup was stored so that running sync wouldn't wipe out the already-backed up contacts....."hide" the old backup, then bring it back and "set up as new iPhone", which I was advised (post-facto) to do to get around the freezing problem(s) that's started since......

So now, maybe, I can just go in mail-contacts-calendar etc and try some switches and turning it off and on again....it stands to reason the data's still in the phone, and it's just an OS glitch that's made theM "disappear".....it's running late at teh webcafe I came to get the download down, so I can't follow through on a lot of stuff tonight, not here, but I did download separately teh 4.0.1 upgrade - but now I don't want to run it until I've restored teh contacts UNLESS I HAVE to run it in order to get them frmo last week's update.....

If I'm sounding confusing that's because I'm confused . At least I gather that getting them out of a backup is not maybe necessary...but it sounds like they may come back piecemeal, or on and off, or one of you soujnds like they haven't come back at all......and timing couldn't be worse, as with last week's temporary loss, I'm both moving and looking for housing as well as pending work, so other than not having contacts at my fingertips I'm ALSO having to spend valuable time dealing with this.......

Those of you who haven't read Samuel Butler's "The Book of the Machines" should have a read thorugh the opening pages.....the hours of my life spent "servicing the machine" are getting out of control......

But what I will ask if it comes to it - is how to I protect my existing backup on my iMac from being sync'd into oblivion when i run the 4.0.1 restore? And will the shakeyness in the contacts database simply be transferred into the newly upgraded OS?

You'd think someone would have come up with an APP just to export/import contacts/phonebooks all at once.......



Aaaarggghggghghhghgh

[peleamsterdam]

Hi Im having the same problem. It started after I deleted mobileme.

Does anyone know how to over come this problem?

[seanmcva]

Go to advanced option in itunes under info. It is located at the bottom of the page. It allows you to "replace information on this iphone". Worked for me!:D

[Rod54321]

I followed the directions to turn contacts off in mobileme, reboot, send message from mobile me- and contacts were not there. I had to go back into settings and turn contacts back on after sending the email- then they were there. That step was missing in the directions.

Cheers

[smit8071]

Well, I was freaked out about the sudden disappearance of my Contacts until this post came to the rescue.

Thanks a million!