Lost my contacts in iPhone 12 mini

When you add a contact it goes to the account that is listed as the default account in Settings/Contacts. To get those contacts back, if the accounts still exist check to see which of them has your contacts using the webmail interface for the accounts. You then need to copy the contacts from that account to the primary email account on your phone. There are several ways to do this:

1. If you have a Mac add the account to the Mac Mail app. Then open the Contacts app, find those contacts and drag them to the main email account group on your phone and they should sync to the phone.
2. If you have Windows you may be able to do that with Outlook.
3. It’s slightly harder on an iPhone, because the default mail app doesn’t have a way to move contacts between groups; you need a 3rd party app to do that. “Groups” is a good app from the app store. It doesn’t have the greatest user interface, but I’m sure you can figure it out.
4. You can also export the contacts from the account where it is located as a vcard file, then import that into the mail app on any other device.
5. If it isn’t a lot of contacts, open the account webmail page, and also https://icloud.com and click Contacts. You can then copy and paste them from the webmail page to iCloud, where they will sync to your phone.

Contacts are not hosted on your phone; the master copy is associated with one or more email accounts, and your phone just displays the contacts that are downloaded from the email account. So you need to know which email accounts your contacts come from, and make sure you are viewing all of them.

Start by going to Settings/Contacts/Accounts. This will list all of the accounts that are providing contact information. If there is more than one, open Contacts and tap on Groups in the upper left corner, and make sure all accounts are checked.

If there is only one make sure Contacts is enabled in Settings/Cellular so it will sync whether or not you are connected to Wi-Fi, and also make sure iCloud is enabled if your contacts come from iCloud.

As I said, contacts are not copied between devices. The master copy of contacts is on the mail server that hosts the contacts, so you need to get the contacts to that server. Open Contacts on your Mac and you should see the list of contact groups in the sidebar on the left. Select the contacts you want to move to to your email account group in the contact list and just drag them to the right group on the left. They should then appear on your iPhone.

How do I copy my contacts from Mac Contacts and drag them to the main email account group on my phone ?