Lost contacts, iPhone 4

Well, I think that all the deleted data can be recovered including the contacts, because all the lost data are still located in your iPhone before they are overwritten. Thus, if you don't overwrite the data, with the help of some useful iPhone contacts recovery software, there are chances for you to recover deleted contacts from iPhone.

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How to recover the iPhone contact ?

Is there a solution for this that doesn't involved the Cloud? I don't use the Cloud. I only sync between my MAC to my Iphone 4s. Favorites shows phone numbers, but it lost most of the contacts. The only contacts that appear are from FaceBook or Gmail (I unchecked these two groups and barely had any contacts left, normally I have over 700 from my mac computer). I've tried telling itunes "replace information on this phone, selecting contacts, from the computer" but that doesn't work either.

hmm...

I want to sharing my experience for you.

I try many methods, do many iPhone settings or iCloud settings, but all fails! And then I turned to a iPhone Data Recovery app.

If you really need to recover lost contacts ,you can also try, it certainly cost, but you can have a free try,and then to see whether it worths.

so i had this problem too and it was very frustrating. i figured out how to fix it though and its pretty easy really,i tried everything. the way to fix it it was to delete my iCloud account from my phone and then log back in.it didn't seem like it was working when i scrolled thru my messages but i did see a couple of names restored .i have about 4500 contacts in my phone and started seeing more come back. it took about 10 minutes. sorry about my grammar and punctuation, i made this account so i could help people since this was so frustrating to me.

You can extract your contacts from the iTunes backup when you lost your iPhone. iTunes can automatically back up your iPhone contacts and update it every time when you sync it. So you really have a big chance to recover contacts from iTunes backup.
If you don't synced, you can directly scan and recover deleted contacts from your iPhone.

Solution 1: Scan and extract iTunes backup to recover iPhone contacts (without iPhone)
Step 1: Scan the backup file
Step 2: Recover your iPhone contacts
http://support.apple.com/kb/ts4108

Solution 2: Directly scan and recover contacts from iPhone 5/4S/4/3GS
Step 1: Connect your iPhone to the computer
Step 2: Enter the device's scanning mode and scan it
Step 3: Preview and recover iPhone contacts

I have an iPhone 4s. Contacts gone all of a sudden, I haven't downloaded or deleted anything recently. However my contacts are on my iPad Air. I am assuming there is a way of transferring them with out doing it manually?

Thanks in advance.

P.S Please break down any instructions as I'm crap with technology!

To recover your contacts from your iPhone you just have to extract your iTunes backup file. For this you just have to configure iTunes so that it does not automatically sync with your iPhone when your phone is connected to your computer. Then connect your phone to the computer, and then open iTunes and right click on your device and press ‘Restore from backup..’. But still you are getting problems in restoring your contacts then you can download free recovery software from google.

Within Contacts, tap Groups at top left. Make sure all contact groups are checked to show, then tap "Done" at top right.

Check under Settings > iCloud to see if the Contacts switch is ON (green side showing). If it's already on, switch it off for 30-60 seconds, then back on again. Your contacts should start showing up shortly.

As far as I know, there are three ways to get back lost contacts on iPhone.

Way 1: Recover deleted contacts with iPhone Data Recovery Software

Way 2: Using iTunes Backup to recover

Way 3: Using iCloud Backup to retrieve

The second and third way is useful if you've made a backups in iTunes or iCloud. But if not, The iPhone Data Recovery tool proficient choice, you can preview and restore a specific lost contact, while iTunes and iCloud just allow you to retrieve all data, which is quite time-consuming.

I had this same problem happen to me this morning. I woke up with contacts, then about an hour later they were just gone. I looked online for a couple of hours but eventually I called Apple. I was (of course) told that I may need to pay the $29 one time service fee, but by this time I was willing to pay it if they could get my contacts back. Long story, short: I did not have to pay any money and they restored my contacts. I have never backed up to icloud, but everything was synced with my gmail account so he easily retrieved it. I also learned a few new things about managing my contacts, all for the low price of free. I highly recommend calling Apple if you have this type of problem - I was very pleasantly surprised.

This has just happened to me & have spent a frantic 2 hours trying to find out how to recover them, thanks to one of the posts on here I downloaded an app called MCBackup, which found all my contacts, emailed them to me and synced them all back onto my phone. It even merged some of my duplicated contacts!

Thanks for the help folks, I am now happily back in possession of my iphone 4 contacts! :-)

I lost my contacts also with the similar symptoms, apps crashing, and then I rebooted my iphone 4, OS 7.1.2 on Verizon, and the contacts were "gone". I followed this same procedure by going to Settings>iCloud and clicked on account. I then clicked on Password and retyped it. The phone then went through a verification and my iCloud account was verified. I went to check my contacts and my contacts hadn't appeared yet. I selected Groups and then selected All iCloud and then all my contacts reappeared! Thanks for the tip Kojokylea!