How do I restore contacts from icloud to my iphone?

Hitting that "delete from my device" is an anxiety provoking trustfall for a moment. Of course, if you've taken extra precaution and backed them up to VCF via icloud.com then it's less of a horror but I think when it saves VCF it does omit some things like contact pics. So you still possibly stand to lose a small bit. But if you just trust in the icloud, it'll fix it. If you chicken out and hit keep, you're gonna have duplicates of every contact and you're gonna wish you'd just lost the **** things. Deep breath.... Delete from phone. Lol.

I turned off contacts as you suggested--but it seems there must be a missing step. After turning off contacts it did not give me the opportunity to perform the next step of 'keeping.' What am I missing. I have an iPhone 6s if that matters.

You might want to consider starting a new discussion. Since this one is marked solved and is a couple of years old, less people are likely to look at it. A new post would be much more visible. You can link to this one.

Call me a cynic but, ‘Apple quietly introduced tools to recover deleted files from iCloud’, suggests to me that they are never really deleted.

Now if this were google, the Fanboys would be up in arms about how Evil Google are storing your data to monetize it.

Thank you for trying to help others out. I have an iPhone 6 with the most current OS loaded. I want to find out how to get my Contacts back from the Cloud where I have been backing them up from my phone. After reading your recommendation I went into Settings/Contacts I found Siri & Search (on) along with Show App (on) and Find Contacts in Othe..... (on). So I turned all of them off, but it never gives me an option to 'Keep'. It does not give me any options at all. Those 3 things are just off. I noticed at the bottom of the Contacts screen an option that is there all the time saying Import SIM Contacts. I did not touch that.

Since nothing happened and I did not get what I was expecting based on your input I turned my phone off and later powered it back up. Nothing different so I turned those 3 options back on.

No luck and I do not know what to do next.

Thanks for your help,

Sincerely, Virg

Welcome to the Apple community.

The only way you could restore any lost contacts is if you haven't made a backup prior to the loss of those contacts. If you have, you would need to completely restore your phone.

Go to settings/icloud on your phone. Make sure you are logged with your apple id.

Contacts should be on, click on it to turn it off and choose keep (even though you show no contacts)

When the process is done go ahead and turn on contacts again, choose merge. All your contacts should show up if you had a previous backup to icloud.

You don't have to restore your phone like the previous poster stated, the above worked perfect for me as I also had a blank list after a restore.

Lungs answer is correct. It worked for me.

Lung you are a legend, thanks mate 🙂

Thank You!!!

OMG --- Thank you so much!!! My iphone was stolen last week and it has been a 'joy-ride' ever since. First replacement the home button was iffy but at least it showed me I don't want to restore from icloud bc I'd get 500 apps! But I want my contacts (and calendar - SAME PHILOSOPHY WORKED FOR CALENDAR!!!) Thanks so much!!!!

Thank you, this has worked

Hi Lungs,

I understand most of your restoring contacts from iCloud procedure but I do have a question, how do I make sure I am logged in to my Apple Account?

My situation is that I need to sync my iPhone to my Mac but my G5 hard drive died and i replaced the drive so its like I'm syncing for the first time again. (I know, very old Mac!) To restore everything from iCloud does the iPhone have to be connected to the Mac? Or am I missing something. I have all my contacts and everything already on my phone but I want to sync it with the Mac once again, I just am scared I'll lose everything that's already on my phone. My biggest concern being contacts. I hope I have made sense!

Any help you can provide would be greatly appreciated!

DA

is there any other way in getting your contacts back?

for example from an old back up?

i've done a stupit thing, synk the icloud with my mack but i let all my contacts to synk via icloud from my iphone now i wanted to get rid of them from my mack and it sims i completely delet them from icloud.

any sugestions?

cheers

DA,

Sorry, don't have a Mac. To log into your iCloud just enter your login from the phone.

I don't think you need to have your phone connected to your Mac (don't have one), from what I've read is that if you are logged into iCloud from your Mac you should be able to do the same. I suggest you take a look at your Mac contents first and delete the old contacts before you sync with iCloud.

Ironnike, I don't know of any other way than to manually do this. You don't have to sync from your iCloud, configure iTunes to do it from your computer and maybe your old backup would work.