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Help! My contacts just suddenly disappeared!

T

TH55

macrumors 68040
Original poster
Nov 5, 2011
3,328
152
I have an iPhone 4S running 5.01. The contacts just suddenly disappeared! Wtf??

I hooked up my phone to itunes to restore from backup. I backed up earlier today and usually do at least once a week. When I went to restore from backup tonight, it only had the backup that it automatically did when I just plugged in but none of the other ones from the last few days, the only other backups were from 2011 and earlier. How is this possible?? I backup every time I sync to iTunes!

I'm going insane, somebody please help me.
 
The automatic backup will only save the latest one as far as I know. You should have made it stop when it was trying to automatic backup as you plugged in.

Do you sync your contacts with icloud or google? If so, the reason might be that you accidentally turned off the sync and all contacts would be removed from the phone because of that, but they could be easily retrieved by turning the sync back on.
 
I was in the Apple Store a few weeks ago and a lady there had a similar issue with her iPhone that was also running iOS 5. The Genius helped her get her contacts back from the iCloud and updated her phone to iOS 6. Really, truly iOS 6 isn't that bad I promise!

Your issue may be what is described here: http://tasel.wordpress.com/2011/11/10/whered-my-ios-5-contacts-go/

If your computer does not support iCloud it's best to not sync contacts that way. Sync through Address Book on your Mac if you have one or possibly through Outlook on a PC.
 
jer04 said:
The automatic backup will only save the latest one as far as I know. You should have made it stop when it was trying to automatic backup as you plugged in.

Do you sync your contacts with icloud or google? If so, the reason might be that you accidentally turned off the sync and all contacts would be removed from the phone because of that, but they could be easily retrieved by turning the sync back on.
Click to expand...

Oh crap. So every automatic backup removes the previous one? If this is the case it shouldn't automatically start backing it up, it should ask. If for whatever reason you accidentally deleted info on your phone and want to restore you shouldn't have to "catch" it in time right after connecting. That's risky.
 
TH55 said:
Oh crap. So every automatic backup removes the previous one? If this is the case it shouldn't automatically start backing it up, it should ask. If for whatever reason you accidentally deleted info on your phone and want to restore you shouldn't have to "catch" it in time right after connecting. That's risky.
Click to expand...

It is the case on my Mac. That's why I disabled the automatically sync when connected...
 
Same thing happened to me. Because I use iCloud, my phone doesn't automatically sync when I plug it in. But I still had trouble getting my contacts from iCloud. I ended up just tapping the contacts app several times and then by some miracle they reappeared. Scary.
 
I merged all facebook + icloud + hotmail contacts with my old 3gs. It was look fine. All contacts has picture + email adr. and facebook account.
I bought an ip5 and restored from icloud. %95 of facebook contacts are lost. Also when I add a new contact, it saves as hotmail account. I filtered hotmail at contacts list so I can't ser new contact on my list.
What's wrong with my phone?
My ios is 6.1.2
 
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