Question regarding Contacts backup and iCloud Synching

[frankc92]

Just wondering about a hypothetical situation:

I have iCloud synched to my iPhone (stolen today..) and my MacBook. Contacts are synched, albeit it was done wrong and new contacts added on my iPhone weren't synching to iCloud.

Regardless, if for some reason one of the two mediums (either my MacBook or iPhone) has some problem in which all the contacts were wiped out.

Would iCloud therefore delete all the contacts saved in backup, as well as the other medium that wasn't originally wiped out?

For example, if you delete one contact on your iPhone, iCloud will delete and then my MacBook will delete.

If I, then, get a new iPhone and sync that to iCloud not having any contacts on it originally, will iCloud all of a sudden delete all my contacts??

It's a strange idea but if anyone can clear it up for me it'd be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance! If you need me to clear anything up don't hesitate to let me know.

 

[d21mike]

I will try to answer this way. You can have multiple Address Books on your devices. The iCloud Address book on your devices is really just a mirror of what is in the Cloud stored locally. If you delete a contact from the cloud it would be deleted from all the other devices that mirror it. However, if you had another Address Book on you device it's contacts would not be touched. Example: If you had a Google Address Book doing the same thing. I think where some of the confusion comes in is when you have a locally stored Address Book that is NOT related to an Cloud Accounts. This would like you old phones where the contacts were stored on the SIM Card. This Address book would not be touched either. Normally these local only address books are not being used any more because they would be device specific and not share with your other devices.