Recovering Contacts from Expired MM account

[ChekMayt]

So, I was having trouble with my MacBook, and decided to restore it to clean it up. It was a great decision and my mac runs so much better... but being the retard that I am, I forgot to back up a few things. Most were no big deal, but one was my address book. Still, I had my iPhone, and so I still thought I had it under control. Then I tried to sync them back to my laptop, but it was disabled saying that all my contacts were synced over air through MobileMe. Well, talk about timing - the day after I restored my laptop (and before I realized my contacts were gone), my MobileMe trial expired. So, I deactivated my account to avoid the charge - and it deleted all the contacts from my iPhone. I probably did things wrong - but now I can't fix it. I am confident that MobileMe still has my contacts, because I can sign in still, and it takes me to an upgrade/continuation page. I just don't have the money to buy a year - any idea how I can get them?

[Mercellus]

I'm not sure if there is a way to restore your MobileMe contacts once the account has expired and has been deactivated. I believe once the account has been deactivated, your information is removed from the server and all that remains reserved is your username (I recently went through this myself).

Did you use Time Machine or anything on your Mac at some point? If so, there may be a way to get your information back.

In the future, I would recommend exporting your Address Book and your iCal databases to a folder somewhere just for safe keeping, if for whatever reason there were to be an issue in connecting to MobileMe or in a case where the account is deactivated, so that you have an offline copy.