iPhone/Address Book Syncing

[ziggyonice]

A friend of mine has an iPhone, but does not have MobileMe. She wanted to sync her contacts (which were on her iPhone) to her Mac's Address Book (which had no contacts).

After connecting her iPhone to iTunes, she went under the "Info" tab and selected the checkboxes to sync Address Book information. The problem with this was that there were no contacts in her Address Book. So now, her phone no longer shows the names of the people she added -- just their phone numbers!

Any way to find out these peoples' names?
Thanks.

 

[mkrishnan]

That's odd. So the phone still has all of her contacts in it, but they no longer have names listed? How are they shown in the phone's address book?

 

[ziggyonice]

The phone just has numbers listed. So she'll go to "Contacts", and there are no names, just their numbers. "Favorites", no names - just numbers. It's like the names are gone. And her Mac Address Book has nothing, no names or numbers listed.

 

[CocoaPuffs]

I think this has something to do with Mobileme or MS Exchange.

I cancelled my Mobileme subscription after trial and did not remove the account from my phone. Out of the blue one day, I decided to delete the account and ended up deleting all the addresses from my phone.

 

[mkrishnan]

First thing I would do is see if you can restore the iPhone from backup.

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1414

You should be able to get the contacts back on the iPhone this way.

Try it again, but first make sure that the option shown in the picture here...

http://www.busymac.com/faq/isync.html

... is set such that you receive a warning when a significant amount of data will be changed.

With iSync in the past, you could force a one-time sync in either direction. In your case, you would overwrite your Address Book from your iPhone. I'm not sure how to do this with the iPhone. I know what she should have done is set the iPhone to sync contacts from the beginning; then, they would have copied into the AdBk each time she did a sync. I'm not 100% sure how to get this same effect with the iPhone as it is now.