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All my contacts just disappeared without any warning, why?

I was just going to call my wife, but realised that she was gone from my contacts and not just her but all my contacts, yikes! So I checked the adressbook on my iMac and on iCloud and there are no contacts there either. What has happened? Please, help me!

iMac, Mac OS X (10.7.3)

Posted on Mar 12, 2012 1:02 PM

Reply
15 replies

Mar 13, 2012 8:14 AM in response to mull_the_man

were your contacts on the iphone right after the update? cause the update could have delete the contacts


if they were still there, then is it possible that you activated icloud on a device and erased the contacts...


did you have a backup of the iphone? you said you updated last week, sometimes it backs up automaticly.

check in itunes, menu Edit>Preferences>Devices (if using a mac it's iTunes menu not Edit) you'll see the backups. If you've got a backup with a date that is before you lost the contacts, restore from that backup if you want:


http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1414


good luck

Jul 26, 2012 1:38 PM in response to mull_the_man

My question is: Whatever the percieved solutions working or not, how is it possible for such a thing to happen at all? My feeling is that it should be impossible for such specific life critical items to simply vanish. Such a possibility, were it not for the fact that it is actually occuring, would be unthinkable. Should be unthinkable. How does it happen? Inquiring minds, who don't like to be left by the side of the road without a tire pump, want to know? Really? This stuff can just vanish? These specific things? And the response is you should have backed up? In my case I did, indeed, back up and the contacts and schedules disappeared on all my iOS devices at the same moment. Again there should be incredulity and outrage that it could happen at all. "Oh, the wing fell off the airplane, and we're just flying along straight and level? Oh well, stuff happens! You have an extra wing on you, right?" These are the items that get you to your Wife, Your Friends, Your Backup if you are in an emergency. The map of your life from day to day. It's just ridiculous. These items should have the ability to be sandboxed. Safeguarded in the operating system or the app like the gold that they are. These items could literally mean life or death. And distinct from the cloud or Mobile me or anything else. The must be. Just be. Always. There when you need them. I couldn't be more surprized or shocked if I had woken up to find my house gone and the neighbors standing around staring. You backed up your house, right?

Jul 26, 2012 1:46 PM in response to avalon5

Whatever the percieved solutions working or not, how is it possible for such a thing to happen at all? My feeling is that it should be impossible for such specific life critical items to simply vanish.

You obviously don't work in IT do you? And if you do, then you probably have no idea what you're doing.


iCloud is not a enterprise grade service, so there are going to be things... LOTS of things that will and can go wrong. What you see as "life critical" on iCloud... Apple see you as one of 50 million people all thinking the same thing.

How can it disappear? It's 1s and 0s. That's it. It's not like the wing of an aircraft, that is an actual physcial thing you can touch.


If you're contacts and data on iCloud are mission critical and you can't do without it for even a second... you don't use iCloud.

Jul 26, 2012 4:55 PM in response to mull_the_man

I thought you all might be interested in the response I got. Here it is. They care very deeply and take it kind of personally. Weird.


'You obviously don't work in IT do you? And if you do, then you probably have no idea what you're doing.


iCloud is not a enterprise grade service, so there are going to be things... LOTS of things that will and can go wrong. What you see as "life critical" on iCloud... Apple see you as one of 50 million people all thinking the same thing.

How can it disappear? It's 1s and 0s. That's it. It's not like the wing of an aircraft, that is an actual physcial thing you can touch.


If you're contacts and data on iCloud are mission critical and you can't do without it for even a second... you don't use iCloud."


The funny thing is, nowhere do I say I use iCloud. In fact I don't. It was just assumed that I do.

Gosh I hope I didn't make some unknown to me tool tech moderator named Irish John cry. I won't be able to sleep tonight.

Jul 26, 2012 5:00 PM in response to mull_the_man

Well, whatever I may or may be, the 1st thing that needs to be said is that you don't know who I am in any

way, shape or form. So your comments, on the contrary, just from the words written, do categorize you as

arrogant, patronizing, condescending, negatively presumptuous, someone who stereotypes and generalizes

about those whom they do not know, conceited, self absorbed, egotistical and I gotta tell you when you peel

back the final layer of that particular onion the center stinks pretty bad. I felt a knee jerk there somewhere.

And as opposed to your remark about enterprise grade systems, "the Cloud's" reliability is implied in every way that

an advertising agency for a large corporation can imply it, as a reliable and absolute backup.

Now I'll just mention that nowhere in my e-mail did I state that I use the Cloud. Just a random miss? a 1 or

was it a zero this time.

I don't buy that it's just sneaky little random 1's and 0's going down the dark digital dirt road less travelled

and arriving at the fork in that transistor path and turning left. There's just too much of that no responsibility

BS going around the whole world these days. "Don't look at me, I didn't do it." is the constant refrain and all

complaints are met with a version of "Bad Consumer! No Biscuit!"

Your response is just like all large corporations and your 1's and 0's is the anology for displaced and diluted

responsibility related to anything that happens. "It's not my fault, it's that A-hole down in shipping that caused the

whole problem." Yes we all have to live the results of that kind of thinking and living.


And the wing analogy is a perfect reflection of the nature of such critical systems. They are built and tested

and retested and stressed and then tested again so that even if they are operated by people with less intellect

than the designers, the likelihood of arriving at B from A is very close to absolute. And then before each

flight and periodically several times year it's taken apart and examined again throughout it's lifetime to look for

defects, which are then FIXED, to ensure, to the greatest degree possible the robustness of the whole

system. Familiar with that concept. No you aren't. Nor can you even relate to it. Until it affects you, I'll just bet.

Plus, from reading the many e-mails about this very issue to varying degrees of catastrophe is see that

it is one **** of a spike in the random background of stealthy little bits and bytes committing helter skelter

from within the OSX operating system. And to do it with such unerring accuracy on 3 apple devices

simultaneously and 7 different applications spread across those devices is not a random glitch in anyones

mind except yours.

You need to step back and consider that something is going on that is unacceptable, and please don't

make me define the word for you. Your opinion is not the operant guiding force here. I'm sure all the people

affected by this "Random" glitch that so surgically removes an exact critical organ from the guts of their devices is

going to be very impressed by your petulant, techie, aristocratic reply.

But to throw out a useless olive branch, no I am not an "IT" guy, but I've been building computers and

operating them since the day of the chicklet key kits you could buy before there was even an operating

system to run them. And just as obviously you got ticked off and had an emotional response.

I mean, it's not your computer so what the **** do you care? I mean enough to leave that kind of response.

That's very weird. Just say you don't know what to do and let it go. Nothing I wrote in that e-mail was directed

at the little guy behind the keyboard. But it got under your skin anyway. Why? Like I said, very weird.

I don't believe that it is true it can't be fixed, it shouldn't be true and it is very likely something that can be done about it.

But clearly not by you. I didn't mean to **** off some cog in the wheel of the technical discussion world at large.

But yes I do rely on it and it should be obvious that something should be and can be done to prevent these absolutely non-random

deletions from occurring in mine and quite a few others computers running apple operating systems. And I'm willing

to bet even without the satisfaction of seeing it happen in person that should the same occur to your system

the reaction would be a real pleasure to observe.

And finally, Apple is certainly taking the real dollars that people are spending for it's products and at the top of the corporate ladder buying some

very real high end royalty lifestyles, while their workers get the ***** treatment short end. You like that? You defend that?

Jeez man, what a tool you are.


Aug 3, 2012 1:20 PM in response to avalon5

I couldn't agree more. My contacts keep disappearing and reapearing? I go to lookup a name and they are gone, all of them. When I return a few minutes later, they are back. Very very disturbing. iCloud needs to fix this and secure peoples valuable information or it will become a thing of the past. The whole idea of iCloud was being able to get to your contacts from multiple devices and sync them, not discover that they keep disappearing from the device you currently only have access to. And oh, I am an IT person.

Aug 14, 2012 10:22 PM in response to mull_the_man

I have been having the same issue for the past week. One minute they are there and then suddenly everything is gone without my doing anything at all. I read the above and since I don't use iCloud at all (I back up my own stuff to an SD card and my desktop and I use Dropbox), I went ahead and deleted the iCloud account from the iphone 4 and then suddenly all my contacts were back.


I'll now watch to see if it still happens, but apparantly iCloud has something to do with this IMHO whether or not you use it or care about it.

Aug 6, 2013 6:15 AM in response to mull_the_man

she was gone from my contacts and not just her but all my contacts


Did you have a backup? Try this: http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1766


If not, did you have your most important contacts written down on paper somewhere? If the answer is YES, you can re-write them.


If not, did you check spotlight? Try this: http://support.apple.com/kb/ht3636


No backup? Try this: View lost iPhone contacts without backup. I hope one of these solutions solves your problem.

Jan 8, 2014 3:54 AM in response to mull_the_man

Someone says "did you have your most important contacts written down on paper somewhere? If the answer is YES, you can re-write them."


Great - isn't that the whole point of having a smart phone? They market the thing so that all the information you have is in one small device.


Well maybe I'll just get rid of the smart phone and invest in a piece of paper and a pen - at least the NSA can't follow you then either!


Andy!!!!

All my contacts just disappeared without any warning, why?

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