All contacts disappeared from IPhone

Hmmm... odd. When I first turned on syncing my contacts from the MobileMe cloud, all of my contacts were removed from the phone while it was performing it's first sync. If you had recently turned on MobileMe syncing and stopped the process before it finished, it could be that the full contact file never got loaded to the phone, then you went into Airplane Mode so it couldn't finish.

I ended up changing the setting to sync my calendars automatically and my contacts manually. That might work for you... Otherwise, I would try to sync again and be sure to give the phone enough time to finish. (Of course, if you're not syncing from MobileMe, I suppose none of this will be helpful!)

/Jim

I had this happen on my new iPhone 3G, and also a friend with an original Phone running 2.0 software. I was adding a new contact to my list, I toggled back to the Home Screen, then back into Contacts. Once I was back in contacts everything was missing! No more contacts, groups, etc. Maybe this is a MobileMe glitch? I am syncing my contacts with MobileMe. The only way to get things back was by shutting the phone off and back on, but I've been consistently having this issue know when modifying/adding contacts.

same thing just happened today on my wife's original iPhone running 2.0. She was using epocrates, went back to contacts and they were gone. we've tried syncing to the computer twice, turned phone off/on and synced again, still no contacts. my original iPhone/2.0 has not had this happened so far.

what's going on?

I changed our three family phones to 3G iphones recently, and all were syncing with my family .Mac account (now MobileMe - a silly name).

We gave just gone on vacation to another country, and all our contacts disappeared on all three phones. Mine have now come back, but the other phones are still blank. What is happening?

Where are the Apple people in this thread, I want to know.

I have a 3G for an employee. We have him hooked up via ActiveSync/Exchange. When we turned contacts "ON" it wanted to take everything off of the phone and use Outlook's DB to overwrite.

The problem is we went to a great deal of trouble to make sure his Blackberry contacts went to his SIM card on the iPhone 3G *so that* we could get the contacts from the phone to his Outlook DB.

I am trying to figure out how to make that happen, and what intermediate step I may need to take. Do I need to download his contacts into my Mac address book, using MobileMe (my personal account, so I am not looking forward to what might happen to my own address book) export to a file, then add to Outlook?

I can't figure it out. And there are no threads that have this specific question, so I apologize if I'm kinda hijacking here. I can't seem to post a brand new question of my very own.

This is crazy!
Since "upgrading" my gen 1 iphone to 2.0, some of my contacts have disappeared. I had been using yahoo to manage contacts and syncing had been great through itunes, Then I had the bright idea to pay for Mobileme , code name F-me! Of 2500 contacts I have no Idea how many have been deleted, but at least 5 that I know of.

Yes, please tell me where all the Apple tech support people are, and why hasn't anyone acknowledged these issues with this "upgrade"!
JPM

The iPhone contact sync with iTunes is AWFUL in my opinion. I just discovered http://my.funambol.com/c/portal/layout?plid=PUB.1001.1 (a free app in the app store). It allows you to sync your contacts without iTunes. It seems to work flawless for me. I synced my contacts to their server and back to Outlook with no issues.

Now I don't have to sync just with Outlook and lose any more contacts.

Join the gang, I have the same problem. Try to get to an apple shop and visit the genius bar, I also suggest looking in your mac address book as they should still be there,if that is any help, I think it is either Mobile me that is causing the problem or the Itunes update

I have a similar problem, but sounds slightly different. A little while ago, and without me having done anything in particular, all of the data in my contacts list on my iPhone is gone, but NOT the names. That is, all of the names are there, but without phone numbers, address, etc. Just the names. I noticed this when I went to my "recent calls" list and saw that there were only phone numbers instead of names, and then went to look at the contacts list.

I started using MobileMe about a week ago, on my two desktop machines and portable as well as my iPhone. It was working great, in that whatever I added to my calendar or contact list propagated to all other machines and devices. Have not had to physically synch the iPhone (using a cable) since I had started using it. All of my software is current. And my calendar is working fine... no missing entries there.

This has happened to me now ... all of my contacts have disappeared completely from my iPhone, but still appear on MobileMe and in my Mac's Address Book. Frustrating!!

I am having the same problem. Yesterday, all of the contact information disappeared from my iPhone, except for the names.

1) On the call lists - recent, voicemail, etc. - the contact names have disappeared and there is only the phone number.
2) On my contacts list - on my iPhone, there are names but no contact information.
3) On MobileMe the Contacts list is complete, and the same is true on my Mac.
4) Syncing with my MacBook didn't fix the problem.
5) Turning off the Contacts sync and then turning it back on seemed to work temporarily.
6) What's going on?!!! This is really not good.

Update: First, all of the other macs and MobileMe have the full contact list... the data (but not the names) had disappeared from just the iPhone.

Based on a suggestion I saw elsewhere, on my iPhone, I deleted my mobileMe account and set it up again. Then I had nothing for contacts at all... not even the names. But after a while, I ended up with the names again, but no data within the contacts other than the name.

Again, all other computers and the MobileMe show all of the data correctly.

So how the heck do I get my data back on my phone?

Same issue here.
The only fool proof way to avoid this is to hard sync the phone and to turn off mobile me syncing.
Cheers,
E

Wow.. What a letdown MobileMe has been. My contacts just completely vanished from my iPhone 3g. Deleting and starting again did not resolve. Hmmph.

All but 34 of my contacts disappeared from mobileme and my iphone on 7/17. I tried numerous fixes to no avail. Finally on 7/25 I found this on the mobilme support page:

Resetting the SyncServices folder

TS1627
Symptoms
You may need to reset the SyncServices folder if you are:

Unable to open iSync in a particular Mac OS X user account.
Unable to click the Sync pane in MobileMe preferences in System Preferences.
Unable to reset data on your computer with data from MobileMe on one user, but another user on the same computer works as expected.
Note: Manually removing the SyncServices folder is strongly discouraged because this may lead to unexpected data loss.

Resolution
Reset the SyncServices folder with these steps in Mac OS X 10.5:

Open iSync.
Choose Preferences from the iSync menu.
Click Reset Sync History.
If this does not resolve your issue, or if you are unable to open iSync, follow these steps:

In the Finder, choose Utilities from the Go menu.
Open Terminal.
In the Terminal window that opens, type or paste the following command on a single line:
/System/Library/Frameworks/SyncServices.framework/Versions/A/Resources/resetsyn c.pl full
Press Return.
When the operation is complete, quit Terminal.

I was unable to reset sync services as the buttom was unresponsive so I held my breath and used the command in the Terminal window. This seemed to solve the problem. It allowed me to reset sync history. From there I was able to reset mobileme and transfer all of my contacts to mobilme. I was also able to transfer my contacts from computer to my iphone. Both of these transfers were unidirectional from the computer to the device. No problems since.

Since I wasted so much time with this I thought I would share my experience. Hope it helps.