Lost contacts, iPhone 4

Well, today all of my contacts disappeared from my iPhone. A couple of days ago I noticed that my "recents" (which HAD been names, like Bill's Cellphone, etc., had all switched to numbers). And also Facebook kept crashing on my iPhone. (COme to think of it my Apple Mail kept crashing too, on my iPhone.) Apple, what should I do? Am I just SCREWED!!?

This happened to me yesterday when I was using WhatsApp which crashed and suddenly all my contacts were gone! I was very very frustated as I have around 300+ contacts. Today I started playing with the settings and I don't know which of my actions brought my contacts back but I will try to list both of them here so you can try and see if they work for you.

1. Goto Settings-> iCloud -> Storage and backup -> Manual Storage. Turn off some apps for which you don't need backup. I think doing this it tries to sync update settings on iCloud. But not sure this is what brought my contacts back.

AND/OR

2. Goto Settings -> Mail, Contacts, Calendar -> iCloud. Turn on/off one of the backups. I turned on backup for notes on iCloud. As soon as I did this VIOLA!!! My contacts were back!!!

Let me know which one works for you guys or nothing works!

Cheers!

I just woke up to my contacts being deleted too. This is devistating, especially for work. I do not know what I am going to do. This is the only problem I have ever had, but a huge one. I recently updated my facebook app as well. I am hopeful that a solution will be found.

Similar story. Although I never actually used iCloud, that I was aware of, I went to Settings>iCloud and switched on. Went back to Contacts and they all appeared. Whew!

Same story. I tried all "solutions" but my contacts never come back ! It seems that Apple don't know what is the fondamental function of the telephone! Just get fool !

Same here, iPhone4 5.1.1. Completely unacceptable because I travel a lot & use Contacts where there is no wifi & sometimes weak 3G at best. Recovering data via iCloud is not always an option so I wasn't using iCloud. Happened after yet another FB update.

I backed this phone up on my old MB Pro so may get contacts back but hesitant to do so because I've had real problems with the address book/contacts interface previously.

This is just unacceptable! Even from the first rumors, Apple should warn us all. Ok, it's now official, and the posts show Facebook app update to be blamed,as in my occasion. I aggre with previous customer about what bussiness had this app with my contact list. It's sooo suspicious.

It's not an accident that this company goes down.

Last time customer

George

P.S People are afraid to use iTunes after so many reverse syncs. It shouldnt be so complicated. If you want to be eccentric try other ways.

****, guessing I'm joining the club. So no solutions other than syncing again with iTunes? And moral of the story is update to the latest iOS? I was just trying to prolong my old way of life. Im sticking to apple though. Guess we cannot fault them for every small glitch. They were begging me to upgrade to iOS 6 for a long time after all.

This exact thing just happened to me (fb app booted me out repeatedly, turned phone off and on, contacts all gone). I have many of my contacts on my computer, but not all, and now I don't even trust these beasts to sync without wiping out more data. I can't believe this is basically a known bug. And if it IS related to my updating the fb app, I never knowingly gave fb access to my contacts. So how did this happen? This is *extremely* annoying.

Actually I'm curious now. I wonder if the issue is 'solved' with 6.1.3 due to facebook intgreation (ie different app structure?) Or will a simple restore to factory 5.0.1 or 5.1.1 will suffice to fix the iOS? (ie similar to just doing CCcleaner etc on a desktop while maintaining the same OS version)

THANK YOU SO MUCH! I followed your advice and my contacts were instantly restored. What a relief!! (I followed your advice no. 2.) I am now updating to 6.1.3, which I had not done.

Please note, fellow sufferers -- Ramvaswani's advice definitely worked for me!

Many thanks --

Mimi Smith

Saturday night I was out with friends. We were watching a band and all I wanted to do was post a photo to facebook. I go to facebook, i go to post a photo, it kicks me out and puts me back to my home page. I do this 5 or 6 times. I don't think too much of it, I figure my battery is dying.

I then go to my email to check email and see if anything interesting is there (band was on a break).

I got kicked out of my email when it was downloading the most current mails. Kicked me back to my home page.

I went to my messages. Tried to send a message, got kicked out of that. Went to my phone numbers, favorites, to call home for a quick message; got kicked out of that.

Thought nothing of it, really, and didn't really notice that my contacts were now all gone.

Also didn't notice that all my messages and imessages were reverted to phone numbers rather than first and last name.

THIS WAS ONLY REALIZED IN THE MORNING.

What did i do to deserve this? nothing. I didn't sync, i didn't drop the phone, i didn't do anything. Only thing i did was delete a few apps (games) and change in and out of airplane mode ( i just flew in from out of town)...

Suddenly, 300 contacts are gone, completely gone, blank page, and i'm stuck with re-naming all my phone numbers (within messages) by hand, one by one.

Long Story Short = i did a google search for "lost contacts on iphone".

I tried all the 'solutions' here.

I tried them all.

I am nervous about icloud already so i did another google search, this time, to "restore lost contacts to iphone" and i found a product called Dr. Fone by Wondershare.

For $69.95 i might buy the software that actually searches the deleted files from deep within my iphone and shows me - - -SHOWS ME - - the lost data - - and that includes messages, photos, voice recordings, calendar reminders, etc, AND MY LOST CONTACTS...~!!

Just wanted to share the good news, all is not lost.

You can also have the program search and scan your itunes data on your PC and it will find the last update, you can also VIEW THE DATA before you choose to "recover"....

What i may do, though, is while i'm sitting in the airport, i'm going to RE-ENTER ALL MY CONTACTS ONE BY ONE... because in their trial mode, you can actually SEE ALL THE INFO that you are searching for.

I'm not going to pay $69.95 if all i'm missing are the contact names....

Granted.... the last backup i did was august-2012 so my contacts from the last 8 months are gone ;-(

Has anyone tried this Dr. Fone software?

Or had another solution to getting back your contacts?

Apparently itunes backup restore can do it but it doesn't isolate the contacts. You would be restoring the entire phone data i believe.....

Not sure if its related or not - but I have just found everybody in my contact book has had their Facebook email address added without me allowing it or knowing about it. I don't want to use my email address that Facebook gave me but I'm now assuming all my friends will have it without me giving it them?

Maybe it was this updating that caused address book / contact problems? I feel like I'm having things forced on me without my allowing it - or maybe I am allowing it on the small print these large companies take advantage of.

OK yet another victim of the lost years of contacts, same scenario.I phone 4 and 5ver 5.0.1 Updated facebook app a week ago and it would lock up several times, finally last night my message app locked up and after a restart no contacts in phone. I cant remember last time I synched, and I didn't have I cloud turned on. So am in same boat as many on here. But I did have one thing to add. I never delete any text messages so I have a lot of past conversations, I can read through to figure out who is who and manually add them. However, I believe my contacts are still in my phone. When I go to the search iphone function and type in a word like "OK" or "HEY" it pulls up all of my text conversations that had that word used in it, and on that screen the name of the person is there like "John Smith" then when I touch that to go to the message it will only show the number in the conversation. any thoughts on this? This makes me feel as though the contacts are still in the phone somewhere. So very annoying.....

I am another angry victim I dont have a back up copy. Seriously considering not buying another iphone ever!