LOST ALL MY CONTACTS AND CANT RESTORE FROM BACKUP!!! HELP

Your Contacts should be on the computer you have regularly been Syncing and Backing up to... are they not...?

What about the iCloud service? Was your phone cabable of and syncing with iCloud before this happened? If that is a possibility, try signing in to icloud.com with your AppleID credentials, and look at the contacts stored in the cloud. It may be the case that they do exist there.

Also, if you were using the iCloud services, you could check your iCloud backups to see if one exists before this happened. Go to Settings>iCloud>Storage and Backup>Manage Storage and if any backups exist in the cloud for your device, you should see it there with the label "This iPhone/iPod/iPad"

If one exists there, it is possible that it might contain the missing data if it was created before this happened. To restore from this backup. please refer to Apple's Knowledge Base article entitled "iOS: How to Backup." To access it, simply click on the support button on the top of the Apple website, and then click in the search box beside it and type in "HT1766" and search. That identifier should bring the right article up immediately, and you can find steps in there detailing how to restore from an iCloud backup.

Let me know what you find, and I'll let you know what we can do from there.

In iTunes on the PC/Windows, try pressing Ctrl + (comma) to bring up iTunes Preferences (On Mac, try Command + (comma)). Once in the Preferences, go to the "Devices" section along the top. There should be listed any extant backups on your computer for any device. Do you see a backup of your phone there?

Some points to consider:

1. Are you syncing contacts with any other service, such as an email address (like gmail or yahoo, etc) or with Facebook, etc.? If so, these contacts likely still exist with those services, and they are just not streaming to your device at the moment. If this is the case, it is a simple fix usually to get them streaming properly again.

2. Are you logged in to the right user account on the computer? I can't tell you the number of times I've worked with people claiming the same as you and it turns out they were logged into the wrong user account on the computer, and their data was still safe and resting in THEIR account, waiting to be manipulated.

3. Syncing contacts and other data does not happen WITH iTunes, but rather THROUGH iTunes. If you were indeed syncing contacts and other info data classes through iTunes to you computer, that data may still be extant and accessible through their respective programs. On PC, iTunes will sync contacts, in particular, to most modern versions of Microsoft Outlook, Windows Contacts, or, with XP, Address Book. On the OS X side, contacts would have been synced with "Contacts" (Mountain Lion) or "Address Book" (Lion, Snow Leopard, Leopard, etc.)

4. If you information has EVER been synced with anything else outside of what has been mentioned above, there is a chance we may be able to recover the data partially. Think for a little while, and see if you can ever remember a time when you may have added your contact information to anything else, computer-wise, internet-wise, etc. and if you come up with ANYTHING, no matter how remote, please let me know, as it may hold a key to resolving this issue.

Please tell me more about your situation, including the items requested above. Also, if you have not yet, I recommend checking your phone for evidence of iCloud integration by going to Settings>iCloud. If you are logged in to iCloud, it should present you with a list of info items that can be synced with an ON/OFF switch next to each one. Otherwise, it will ask you to log in.

Any and all data you can provide me about this situation would be of great help in assisting you with resolving this issue.

At this point then, let's summarize what (At least, to my knowledge) we know so far:

Your iPhone 3GS or later had an extant contact database, and after crashing, iOS booted up without any contact data whatsoever. Your phone has reportedly been synced to iTunes many times on a Mac computer running OS X, version unknown, and since the phone was not integrated with iCloud before this, each sync should have attempted to create a backup. Your computer reports no backups to speak of, and iCloud has no backups either from what you say. You also state that the phone has not been syncing contacts with an email address, exchange account, social media site, etc. before this happened.

If all of this is true, I would make sure to check Contacts/Address Book on your Mac for any signs of your contacts and any other devices that might have the information, even partially. I was under the impression that the Contacts program, like Address Book, and even iCal/Calendar, all have a running backup that is updated anytime changes are made to the data. If this is true, which I am currently looking into, then it may be a simple matter of restoring your Contacts/Address Book to a previous state, similar to Windows System Restore.

It is also possible that the information may have been saved in a backup of your Mac using Time Machine. I would check for any backups of your computer and if any are found, try searching the folder "~/Library/Application Support/MobileSync/Backup/" for any folders. If any backups of your phone exist in the backup of your computer, they should be found in that location, and will show up as a folder with a long, unintelligible string of hexidecimal numbers and letters. If you find such a folder in that location, then a backup does exist there, and we can look into recovering it. I do not have a Mac myself, but if Time Machine works anything like the rest of OS X I have experienced, it should let you browse through the backed up data and pick and choose what you want to restore to your hard drive. I would also recommend checking your hard drive for any backups as described above in that location, as it is possible that your iTunes is on the fritz and is not recognizing the backups that it already created and put in that directory.

At this point, we also do at least have the numbers that are still present from the Messages that your phone received. A partial contact database, though a pain, could be recreated from that data.

Let me know if any of this helps.

I hope so as well.

Also, I highly recommend contacting AppleCare, either iOS department or CPU department, about this problem. I'm not sure of your warranty coverage or phone support coverage, but it may be worth the $19 + tax (if needed) to get a another professional opinion on this. They have more tools to troubleshoot these kind of things than we do, and if they are unable to resolve your issue over the phone, they can refund that $19+ dollars. iOS may have some idea of what's going on here after some probing, and CPU may be able to assist with data recovery on the OS X side of things. They can even share your screen on the Mac and assist you while seeing what you see on your side. Worse comes to worse, you're only out about 20 bucks and you should have at least a better idea of what can be done about this, why it is happening, how to prevent it in the future, and even best practices for data backups, iOS or OS X.

ok i have all the information for my icloud but i cant remember my password how do i fix it to where i can reset my icloud password?

shawty68 wrote:

ok i have all the information for my icloud but i cant remember my password how do i fix it to where i can reset my icloud password?

Start here:

https://iforgot.apple.com