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Lost contacts, iPhone 4

My wife's iPhone 4 has suddenly decided to delete all her contacts. She didn't connect to iTunes or do anything out of the ordinary.

The phone kicked her out of a few applications back to the home screen, so she switched the phone off and on again.

On checking contacts, she saw the entire lot were gone.


No idea if they were gone before the switch off or not but all seems very strange.


Subsequently updated to the latest OS6 to see if that would help (which it didn't!) but was running OS5 when the problem occurred

iPhone 4 (8GB), iOS 5.1.1

Posted on Feb 4, 2013 1:11 PM

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432 replies

Feb 4, 2013 3:01 PM in response to Zoomer271

Sorry about the contacts.


The iphone is not really a storage device. It simpy mirrors the selected content of your computer.


Nothing should be only on the iphone.

Everything should reside on your computer (you should always maintain a backup copy of your comptuer)/


The iphone simply allows you to take selected content from your computer with you when you are away from the computer.

Feb 5, 2013 8:53 AM in response to Zoomer271

The same thing happened yesterday to my daughter's iphone 4. She kept getting kicked off her messege app and turned her phone off and then back on to try to reset it and lost all of her contacts in the process. She was no where near her computer and so was not syncing. Just a major glitch in her phone's operation.


Unfortunately, she made the mistake of coming home and syncing her phone to iTunes instead of restoring from backup. Are her contacts gone for good? She has a Windows PC, not Mac, and we are looking for previous restore points. Please help - nothing like a frustrated teenager...

Feb 8, 2013 8:33 PM in response to Zoomer271

Me and my friend both recently suffer from this ill fate. The warning symptoms are similar as described by OP and sullimon24, getting kicked out of message and call, once the phone is turn off then on, volia => all contact erases. Luckily, I regular back up the phone to itunes. This seems to be a minor glitch but the occurences are happening more frequent, which is going to be a PITA. I really think apple should do something about this issue. WE NEED A SOLUTION.


P.S. my device is iphone 4s, version 5.0.1

Feb 27, 2013 1:23 AM in response to vanessawinter69

Still no idea what caused it, but we resorted to typing all the contacts back in


To try and avoid future occurences, we've both installed an app called 'My Contacts Backup' which will capture all your contacts off the phone and embed them into an e-mail (which you send to yourself) as a .vcf file. Obviously you need to do this on a regular basis if you add contacts frequently


NB - if your computer is not a Mac, the e-mail will arrive with an attachment which when opened appears to only hold one record


If you're on a Mac, apparently the file does indeed hold multiple contacts


Our solution - send it to yourself to a mail address that you have set up on your iPhone and then basically keep the e-mail stored in the inbox on the phone


Should the situation occur again, just open the attachment and the saved contacts will be immediately uploaded back to the phone


We don't sync contacts on iTunes (which would obviously be another option) as we both use the one PC but have different contacts (including my business contacts which are synced by a Microsoft Exchange server as well over the air)


Not a solution as such to the problem, but at least we now have our contacts saved outside of the contacts section of the phone


Also updated my wife's phone to iOS6 and haven't had any problems since, but I'm not sure that's the issue really

Feb 27, 2013 3:21 AM in response to Zoomer271

Same thing happened to me about 6 hours ago. Was doing nothing out of the ordinary when all apps crashed. Turned phone off for an hour and back on and all contacts are gone. This is extremely frustrating. As far from what I'm reading in other posts there doesn't seem to be an answer on how to solve this other than restoring or typing in contacts again. I'm extremely upset with apple about this. Fix the problems please!!

Lost contacts, iPhone 4

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