Contacts names disappeared

it also happened to me yesterday (Jan 11)...half of my contacts lost their names or disappeared. My "Favorites" phone numbers are still there, but their names and contact information have disappeared! I didn't synch to anything.

This also happened to me around the same time.

Just to be clear... the names for each contact in the Favorites list under the phone app have disappeared. Each favorite is displayed only as a phone number instead of that contact's name. My actual contact list on the phone is intact and unaffected.

Adding a new favorite to the list will result in that new contact having a name... for a while.. but it too eventually loses it name and displays only as a number.

***???

Message was edited to provide more detail about the problem.

Not sure what you mean by you synced to a backup on a specific date. Does this mean you restored your iPhone with iTunes from your iPhone's backup?

There is no choice in dates to sync.

iTunes creates and maintains a single backup for your iPhone, which is updated as the first step during the iTunes sync process. A new backup for your iPhone is created after restoring your iPhone with iTunes from your iPhone's backup beginning on the date your iPhone was restored with iTunes.

Although contacts are included with your iPhone's backup, contacts are designed to be synced with a supported application on your computer. Which supported application on your computer are you syncing contacts with? Is your contact info correct with the supported application on your computer?

This happened to me yesterday. Just walking outside it turned itself off and when it came back on my contacts list was empty. It wasn't the result of a sync because I have not done so in about a week. Just like everyone else though, the numbers appear on my favorites and recent call list, but not in contacts. I tried to sync my phone a minute ago hoping they would pop up but to no avail.

Under the Info tab for your iPhone sync preferences with iTunes below the Advanced section at the bottom, select Contacts for replace info on this iPhone. Select Apply which will be followed by a sync. This will replace the contacts on your iPhone with the supported application on your computer you are syncing contacts with.

That's where it gets confusing for me. I'm not syncing my contacts from any kind of program. I never have. They were just on my phone.I think I'm pretty much sailing up a creek without a paddle.

Copied from my previous post.

Although contacts are included with your iPhone's backup, contacts are designed to be synced with a supported application on your computer.

I think I'm pretty much sailing up a creek without a paddle.

Yes you are, which is why you should sync contacts with a supported application on your computer as is designed and intended. How do you get by without having all your contact info available on your computer, or having email addresses only for contacts on your computer, phone numbers only for contacts with your cell phone, and mailing addresses only for contacts who knows where. And what would happen if your iPhone were lost or stolen and you didn't have the resources to purchase another iPhone at the time?

Sorry, but I think you can kiss your contact info goodbye, but lesson learned.

Yes lesson definitely learned.
My contacts used to be on my computer, which was stolen.

I actually had all my contacts on my mobileme account and pushed those on to my iphone...and the contact on my mobileme now have only names with little to no information & my favorites are completely gone as contacts. I thought I was safe having these backed up onto my mac address book, which has most of the contacts, but not the most recent ones I've added in the past couple weeks prior to this craziness.

from reading other forums, this has been a reoccurring issue for many. i'm chatting with mobileme support now. I'll post what happens.

Kbouv, did MobileMe support have anything helpful to say about this problem?

This just happened to me too. I went to "settings" on my iphone, select "mail, contacts, calendars, then towards the bottom select "import SIM contacts". This fixed it for me. Hope it helps!

i can offer a different take on this problem. i've had my iphone for 6 months. the sim card i use was taken from my previous phone, and all the contacts on that sim were ingested into my iphone. over the past 6 months my contact list has grown. when i did a sync through itunes recently, all my new contacts were deleted. i couldn't find them anywhere.

"I went to "settings" on my iphone, select "mail, contacts, calendars, then towards the bottom select "import SIM contacts". This fixed it for me."

iPhone does not store any information on the sim card. If that fixed it for you it's only because the contact information stored on your sim by your previous phone "fixed" the contacts on your iPhone.

"iphone does not store any information on the sim card."

interesting. thanks kadelic, i didn't know that.

This happens periodically to me as well. I am using a MacBook at work and an iMac at home. I use MobileMe to sync my contacts and calendar to my iPhone and to sync my MacBook and my iMac. This started happening to me last summer.

Periodically all my contacts disappear from the iPhone. When you open Contacts there is nothing there at all. When you look at "Favorites," the phone numbers are there with no addresses. Sometimes when this starts to happen there is a period when the names, addresses, and notes are still there in Contacts but without any phone numbers and email addresses. Trying to hard reboot the phone, though, will delete those as well. Typically though, there is just nothing there. Eventually they will come back, usually within an hour, though the first time this happened (while I was on vacation), the address book was gone for 4 days, effectively crippling me from doing anything but reply to emails. Note that I have a fairly large address book with over 3,200 entries.

Calendar is unaffected by this problem. Bookmarks also seem to be stable.

For a while this happened very regularly (more than once a week). At some point it's frequency became less regular, perhaps because AT&T's network has become much more stable over the past year in New York City. Unfortunately after a couple of months of stability, it has happened again to me on two occasions in the past two weeks.

I saw a MacRumors forum entry that suggested going into setting and turning off the cloud sync and turning it back on as a way to recover the address book. I'm a little suspicious of trying that, but it's an option. Unfortunately since this isn't a problem that can be reproduced at will, I have no way of testing this solution in an environment when I won't be crippled. It happened again twice in the last two weeks, both of course when I was trying to meet someone in the city and was as a result unable to contact them.

Today I decided to turn off MobileMe for contacts, concluding that the software is fatally buggy. Instead I will manually sync via iTunes with my computer at home. I would love to see Apple come up with a solution so that I can use MobileMe again, but I'm not very hopeful given this problem has been in evidence for over two years (I've found reports of the same problem going back to 2008 in various forums on the internet), with no evidence of Apple acknowledging the problem or proposing a solution.