Lost ALL phone numbers on my iPhone 3G :-(

[dougb256]

My wife was helping me this morning and in the process she deleted ALL of my phonebook entries on my iPhone. A sync between the iPhone and MacBook has occurred since then, which of course makes matters worse.

If I restore my MacBook from yesterday's Time Machine backup and then do a restore on my iPhone (which will use the backup file created before all of my data was deleted) will this restore my phonebook entries?

Thanks,
Doug

 

[Small White Car]

You probably don't have to do that much, even.

Try to restore the phone from backup first and see what date and time option it gives you. It's possible you've got a phone backup in there that's older than this mistake.

What do you sync with? Apple's Address Book? Once you fix this, go into the Address Book on your Mac and export a backup file for safety. Keep it somewhere other than your computer, like Dropbox. Do that once a month or so and you'll have an easier time fixing this if it ever happens again in the future.

 

[yetanotherdave]

open address book, enter time machine, restore all your contacts, re-sync with the phone, boom, you are done, no restoring the phone, no restoring your computer. Nice and simple, 2 minute job.

 

[Small White Car]

open address book, enter time machine, restore all your contacts, re-sync with the phone, boom, you are done, no restoring the phone, no restoring your computer. Nice and simple, 2 minute job.

Gah...can't believes I forgot about that. Address Book (like iPhoto) is one of the Time Machine enabled apps. Good call.

 

[dougb256]

open address book, enter time machine, restore all your contacts, re-sync with the phone, boom, you are done, no restoring the phone, no restoring your computer. Nice and simple, 2 minute job.

Well, this is part of the problem - none of my contact info (around 90 phone numbers) from my iPhone was in Address Book. We tried to correct that problem by uploading my iPhone info to MobilMe. It did upload successfully, but then the Customer Support guy was telling my wife "Do this, do that" and in the process wiped out all my phone numbers on my iPhone AND in MobilMe.

So I figured that maybe I could take an old iTunes backup (there is only one on my MacBook, which was created after the snafu) and do a restore from there.