iOS 5 update deleted my phone contacts, photos and text messages!

If you synced your contacts and photos they should be on your computer. What backups are listed in iTunes > Prefernces > Devices. Any one of them recent? If you use a Gmail account I would suggest syncing your contacts with that account. This way if you do lose your contacts they'll be available in Gmail. You can also sync Address Book with your Gmail account.

i have spent the past 14 hours (so far) attempting to download IOS5. First i got a message saying i have "error OxE8000065" then another message saying "iTunes was unable to load data class of information from Sync Services" and once, it was kind enough to download for 3 hours then said it had "timed out". I have now FINALLY got this IOS5 downloaded. what a mistake. I have also lost everything - music, texts, contacts, photos and do not know how to get this back. any ideas? if so, plz keep it simple as im no expert at these phones. i am on the verge of thowing this phone out the window and getting a blackberry or anything else to save this endless updating & losing data

Just what you want when you've lost all your contacts is some bright spark telling you that you should rely on a £500 phone not to delete them. As you can guess, this has just happened to me - all my phone contacts - brilliant, well done Apple - never had this problem with Nokia, Sone Ericsson, siemans etc etc. Serve me right for treating myself!

same thing here... all the contacts are gone, tried everything and nothing at the end. shame on apple. Jobs gone and apple already started dying.

Yupp same thing here! FINALLY got the iOS 5.0 onto my iPhone 4 after countless hours of honestly wanting to put a hammer to both my phone and computer. I was attacked with error codes after error codes. I did the backup as iTunes wouldn't allow the update without backing up. Just the backup alone took at least 1-1/2 hours! Had to do it about 4 times before iTunes "accepted" it. So everything is dandy, finally got the iOS on my phone and I go to restore my phone. And bam. Look on my phone. No contacts. No photos. No text messages. No music. No apps. The backup didn't work when it said it did. *** apple?!

Any help on this guys? Most appreciated. Largest worry is my contacts. I had 500+

This is just ridiculous! I have the same issue. Downloaded IOS5 and now everything is gone.

Before anyone starts blaming me for being an idiot or smth then

YES I did back up before i started upgrade

YES I did try iExplorer / iPhone explorer to find corrupt photos index file

YES I did try to restore to earlier version of backup

YES I did restart, reboot, re-did everything I could find in forums

Only things I was able to recover were contacts and notes. These I managed to upload to iCloud somehow after they had appeared from a backup.

Still missing: photos, calendar appointments, text messages, favourites (in contacts), music, apps data (all apps seem to be starting for the first time, no data saved).

Only thing there is that I have separate accounts for iTunes and iCloud/mobileME, because it didn´t allow to use itunes account in iCloud, so I have two now and both are also usable as AppleID.

If iTunes always backs up my iPhone when I plug it in, where are all the files to restore it to previous settings and data???

I´m about to sue apple for wasting half my day on this ****!

Same here. Very unhappy. Been having a lot of issues with apple products lately. Within the last few weeks:

1. Apple TV loses all 30+ videos I bought through iTunes. Apple helped me get some of them back but not all.

2. Macbook Air screen glitches constantly

3. Lost all contacts after my iPhone upgrade...

4. and to top it off...the last three items upset my pregnant wife so I have to deal with that too...lol

How I plan to deal with it:

- No more iPhones for me or my wife

- We're replacing our laptops within the next month or two - they won't be apple

- I own an IT consulting business so no Apple recommendations from me

- Keep telling people to do the same...

TallinMac, you said that you were able to get your Contacts back. That right now is my biggest concern because I had 500+ contacts before "backing up" and "restoring" to find that iTunes acceptance of this process was obviously a glitch where I lost everything after the update. Any ideas?

I agree with EVERYTHING posted. I started my backup at ~7:30 PM last night (Thursday) and I just finished. (12:10 PM Friday). iTunes crashed while syncing apps so I ended up with 13 pages of apps that I had to reorganize into folders. My contacts were supposedly sent to The Cloud, but I had to manually sync them back in from Address Book to my iPhone. Now all my thumbnail pics for contacts are gone. I also have a second blank calendar that I can't seem to delete. Now I'm wondering if anything will work. What a nightmare.

Wish I had seen your post earlier, same worked for me after ages messing around

About a month ago the harddrive on my PC died and I lost everything on there, fortunately I had all I needed stored on my iPhone 4 for future use, including all my music and apps and contacts so I wasn't worried. I left it a few weeks before using iTunes again because I've been so busy with work and thought tonight would be the right night to restore my iTunes library, only to be asked if I wanted to install the ios 5 update before I went ahead, so I did and was assured that everything would be fine, why wouldn't it right?!

The update took 4 hours and, when my iPhone finally came back up it had deleted all of my apps, music (980 songs) and my pictures. I did a restore since it had backed up all my info before the update and reloaded. The restore proceeded to delete everything else, my contacts are now gone. I have nothing, all the money I've spent all the extras I've bought all the time I've put into personalising my iPhone gone, wasted. I cannot express to you how amazingly angry I am, partly because I can't get an answer from anyone.

What do I do now? Is there anything I can do? Please someone help me (with as few patronising basic 'turn it on and off again' style hints as possible please) I am at my whits end and refuse to pay Apple for the priviledge of fixing THEIR error. One last thing, can I sue Apple for releasing a fault product/accidental destruction of my phone?

Same Here!!! Contacts, Calendar entries, apps are all gone after upgrade to 5.0. I know I have recently backed up my iphone but it said that my last backup was back in august which is not true. At least I was able to get some of my contacts back but all my apps and other things are gone. I have tried everything i have found on other forums and nothing works. VERY DISSAPOINTING!!!

The only thing I can say is ditto. Lost all contacts after upgrading, tried everything listed to fix this and - absolutely no use. UNBELIEVABLE!