iPhone backup corrupted....

Are you using a PC or a mac? I don't know about macs but if you are using a PC then your contacts should be stored in outlook in which case you only need to hit setup as a new phone and then sync your contacts from outlook.

When you setup the iphone for the first time you got a window that had drop down boxes for how to sync things. The choices for email were like Outlook, windows mail and None. Did you pick None? If so, you might be out of luck since I dont think the iphone stores contacts on the sim card.

Are you sure you dont have outlook installed? It comes with office. Check and see and if you find it installed open it and click the contacts button, maybe you'll find your contacts there.

I lost all of my contacts once because of a stupid mistake I made with an ipaq I used to own. Turns out I got most of them back because I found them stored on my old cell phones sim card...if you have old sim cards laying around check them.

Message was edited by: spikesnet

Not if its corrupted. You can try taking it to the apple store and see if they can help you though.

On a normal phone, that is one of the points of the sim card. However, apple doesn't always make sense.

One other thing I should point out is I only read somewhere that the iphone doesn't store numbers on the sim card. I never verified it. If you have another phone around pop your sim card in it and see if there is anything on it. Or, take the sim card to an AT&T store and ask them to see if there is anything on it.

You may have already tried this, but sometimes people don't think of doing the obvious.

I was having a similar problem- my phone was frozen on just a bright white screen so I did a restore on it, then when I went to sync with my backup it said the backup was corrupted. I quit iTunes, unplugged the phone, then restarted iTunes and plugged my phone it. It was reading it as my phone and then it synced with my backup. Dunno what that was about, but it seems to be fine now so I hope this helps you too.

The iPhone does not store numbers on the SIM card. It stores them in its internal memory.

I had the same problem and this is what I did to fix it


1. Restore phone
2. Set up as a new phone
3. Use it for a little bit (send messages, emails, etc)
4. Restore phone
5. Restore from back up
6. Remove Sim after phone is activated
7. Restore backup

I stand corrected.
It did recognize my phone, and restored all my apps and stuff, but contacts and notes are all gone. Major bummer.