HT202340: iPhone: Understanding SIM cards
Learn about iPhone: Understanding SIM cards
Q: lost my contacts on my iphone and they are not in the icloud! help!
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Apr 18, 2012 11:21 AMby cllord,Well, that is an excellent question and you may be able to save a marriage if you can crack this code. We have a family plan with ATT and my phone is the sub. My husband, the pseudo Apple guru thought that everything was synched to the cloud and it turns out that only his phone is. I did not know that i had to synch to the computer and hence have now "synched" and I have his useless contacts on my phone and none of mine. Because the synch happened yesterday, it overwrote any old data that I may have had from the last time I hooked up to the mac, which was january.
Soo, it seems like the only solution to get some of my data is to locate the old sim card from the BlackBerry I stopped using in 2010. Both Apple and ATT told me too bad, soo sad in regard to my contacts and that the sub account was not set-up to backup properly.
I am still convinced that my tons of contacts are out there somewhere on the hard drive of the phone. I did not proactively delete them. I just need to know how to tap into the storage component tied to the phone. Apple is smarter than to let pseudo techies destroy themselves like this.
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Apr 18, 2012 11:26 AMby KiltedTim,Do you remember how you originally got them onto the phone? If it's an iPhone 4, there is virtually no chance that you imported them from the SIM as the 4 and 4S use a Micro-SIM. You could not have taken the SIM from another phone and put it into the iPhone without physically cutting it to fit. I'm also willing to bet that you didn't enter them all into the iPhone by hand. That means they had to come either from Address book or Outlook. Check on your computer to see if they still exist. If they do, you can sync them back. If they do not, you may need to go back and check backups of your computer from a time when they did exist.
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Apr 18, 2012 11:35 AMby cllord,They did it in the store when I got the phone. The Blackberry address book would capture both sim card contacts and address book contacts.
I think I am officially hosed up. The data is not there. I am so tempted to restore to factory settings and hope that the numbers are stored somewhere on the phone as backup, but that is just wishful thinking.
The weird thing now is that the synch I did under my device in iTunes loaded my husband's contacts and I just received a text meant for him to me. What a blessed mess.In all honesty, we were bellsouth.net and yahoo users and were stuck in the beta for the new UI. I dropped them when I saw how many issues they were having and did not allow me to change my password. My husband never switched over and I think that they did something because my old address book in yahoo is still there online and the few users who had a yahoo address still show as a contact. Everyone else is gone. Since he is still on yahoo, and is the main account, my back-up looks like it was tied to yahoo. I think something happened with ATT and yahoo that caused the random delete, but there is nothing to do.
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Apr 18, 2012 11:42 AMby KiltedTim,Sounds like you restored your phone from a backup of his. iMessage has been activated with his e-mail address.
You may not be able to recover your contacts at this point, but you need to do some planning before you move forward.
Create separate user accounts on your computer for each of you. You will need to log into the computer as yourself, then you will have your own unique copy of iTunes and your own address book. Do not share an Apple ID. Make sure you each have your own. Otherwise, you risk the kind of cross contamination of data that you have now.
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Apr 18, 2012 12:59 PMby cllord,We do have separate sign-ons to the machines, but the iTunes account is singular with him as the master account. This is the issue.
I am absolutely crushed that there isn't a way to get all of that data. I used to be a hard core archiver, but I thought I was so well insulated between time machine and our "auto" back-up. Never dreamt that the "master" set-up would do this to subaccounts. Wish there was a better solution to all this.
If I were to restore to factory settings, what would be the worst thing that could happen?
I also do not want to use my gmail account for storage because of privacy concerns and I despise yahoo after everything I have been through with ATT.
What is the best way to synch the apple address book to itunes?
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Apr 24, 2012 6:23 AMby alexandra m,If you would have had locally saved backups by any chance, BlackBerry ones or iPhone ones, you could have used the BlackBerry Backup Extractor or the iPhone Backup Extractor software. Try at least to use the free version of these software to simply check your PC for backups, maybe something's there? This is really a bad mishmash.
