Can I recover deleted iCloud contacts?

You can follow below guide to check your iPhone and these contacts are still in your iCloud. Below are the detailed steps on how to restore contacts from iCloud.

Get or Restore contacts from iCloud

1. Log into iCloud on the web with your Apple ID and password.
2. Click the "Settings" icon in the main iCloud menu.
3. Click on the content you need to restore. Options are files stored in iCloud Drive, a list of contacts, or your Calendar and Reminders. Here you just need to click ”Restore Contacts”. Select an archive of contacts to restore. Click Restore to get deleted contacts back.

The following link has instructions on how to restore using an iTunes or iCloud backup. Note that a restore will replace all of the data on your phone with the data from the time of the backup. There isn't a way to restore just Contacts from a backup. Restore your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch from a backup - Apple Support

If you had the Contacts synced to iCloud (i.e., if Settings > iCloud > Contacts was turned on), you can use a computer and log in to https://www.icloud.com/ and then go to the Settings app there and in the Advanced section at lower left there is an option to Restore Contacts. Using that will allow you to select an archive date and will then restore your Contacts on all of your devices that have Contact sync turned on. It will also make a new archive of the contacts before it does the restore.

The only was to recover is if you had your iphone backed up to your computer with the information on it, not through iCloud. Otherwise its gone.

Yes, you could have recovered from the iCloud backup as long as you didn't backup again over the most recent copy. You need to reset your phone through the Settings > General menu. When the phone reboots as a new phone, you will go through Setup Assistant. Choose "Restore from iCloud Backup" and enter your iCloud account and password. You will see the three most recent backups for each of the devices on which you enabled Backup. Choose which backup to restore from. Ta-da!

I accidentally deleted two contacts from my iPhone. I solved this by going to my Mac, starting Contacts app, entered Time Machine. I went back to an earlier time, and selected (one by one) the deleted contacts. Then I chose (while in TM) 'send by messages'. Went out of TM, In the Messeges Dialogue box draged out the contact to my desktop and reimported them in to contacts (also by dragging).

After all this I made a safety copy by doing an export from Contacts to my Dropbox account

Good Luck! 😎

I have deleted my contacts on icloud by mistake. However, i switched my iphone to airplane and so they are still on the phone. also i have a backup of ht e conntact details via iTunes. how can i resend the contacts to icloud so they can be resunced with my ipad and mac book?

thanks you roy

This solved it for me!

There are some 3rd party apps that claim to be able to retrieve things such as contacts, text messages, photos that you have deleted or lost somehow from iPhone on Macs and PCs. You would need to find a iPhone data recovery software tool. They may not be free. Here is the one I used and it worked:

http://www.recovery-android.com/iphone-data-recovery.html

In the future, I highly suggest you back up your iPhone to iCloud, or at least use something like Dropbox or Google Drive. With so many free backup options out there there's no reason not to use one.

Check more about recovery from: http://www.recovery-android.com

If you have ever had you iPhone sync with iTunes, then you can get all the contacts that you had the last time you had it synced. Just connect it to iTunes and click on the summary tab. Then choose restore. Have a look at http://www.video-converter-mac.org/recover-iphone-contacts/ for more information.

First, check whether you have iTunes backup of your iPhone or not by clicking “Edit” > “Preference” > “Devices” in iTunes. If the answer is yes, restore your iPhone with the iTunes backup. If you just want to get the contacts backup instead of erasing your all the content and settings on your iPhone or restoring with an out-of-date backup, use an iPhone backup extractor to extract the contacts from the iPhone backup.

Other than restoring from iTunes or iCloud backup and extracting contacts from iTunes backup, there are still at least 3 other solutions for you to retrieve contacts from iPhone:

1. Recovering contacts with an iPhone data recovery software;
2. Copying old phone’s SIM card;
3. Sync with other cloud accounts, such as Google Contacts.

Hi All,

I found the solution, i just tried it and it worked, hence thought of sharing it, to save you guys buying apps and etc.

Case : In iCloud settings, i turned Contacts OFF and it asked to delete and i agreed, only then to realise that it was the wrong account, i wanted to turn off email contacts but instead chose iCloud.

Resolution :

1. Go to www.icloud.com ASAP.

2. Enter your Apple ID credentials ( same used in iphone )

3. Select Contacts.

4. Select All contacts ( By pressing CMD+A )

5. After all contacts are highlighted, on the below left corner, click on the Options.

6. Select Export contacts vcf.

7. It will automatically download to the Downloads folder.

8. Automactically Contacts app will open and ask if you would like to import this contacts on ur MAC. Select NO.

9. Locate the Export contacts.vcf in Download folder, select it , right click it, and share it through Email.

10. Send an email to yourself.

11. Open the email, open the attachment ( which would the contacts )

12. Select Add all contacts, select as New contacts.

13. All contacts will be added automatically, only the photos will dissappear.

Note : I have tried the above resolution only on iPhone, i have not deleted contacts from iMac, and tried the same.

Hope this helps, i could have restored the iphone also , but this was much quicker. 🙂

Having Contacts open, then going into time machine and scrolling back to when all the contacts were there helped me! But rather than doing 1 by 1, I clicked "All Contacts" on the sidebar, then I clicked one of the contacts in the contact field, then I pressed both "Command" "A" on the keyboard to select all contacts. Then I hit restore.

I got the notification that there would be a ton of duplicates (since only half of my contacts actually got deleted). I had the option of keeping the old, keeping the new, updating, or merging the contacts. I selected keep the old because as I toggled from one option to the next by pressing the options, I noticed that the other options did not retain the photo image I had for each of the existing contacts. Once I made that decision, I clicked "do this for all".

When it finished bringing them over, I saw that the contacts that were deleted were back and highlighted in blue as new!

I'm so happy! 😍

Having Contacts app on Macbook Pro open, then going into time machine and scrolling back to when all the contacts were there helped me! But rather than selecting the missing contacts one by one (since I'm not sure how many are missing), I clicked "All Contacts" on the sidebar, then I clicked one of the contacts in the contact field, next I pressed both "Command" "A" on the keyboard to select all contacts. Then I hit restore.

I got the notification that there would be a ton of duplicates (since only half of my contacts actually got deleted). I had the option of keeping the old, keeping the new, updating, or merging the contacts. I selected keep the old because as I toggled from one option to the next by pressing the options, I noticed that the other options did not retain the photo image I had for each of the existing contacts. Once I made that decision, I clicked "do this for all".

When it finished bringing them over, I saw that the contacts that were deleted were back and highlighted in blue as new!

I'm so happy! 😍