iPhone 4s, Contact backup and restoration

Question

Level 1

4 points

iPhone 4s, Contact backup and restoration

Hello, I have an iPhone 4s and I need to restore from factory settings but as a businessman I have tons of contacts on my phone and I can't afford to lose them. They are saved in my iCloud but I worry that if a reset to factory settings, I will lose the data. I am doing this because I need to delete the 9GB of Documents and Data I have because my phone has hardly any space.

So, the task at hand:

1. How do I assure that my contacts will be saved and not lost if I restore my phone from factory settings?

2. Once I restore, how do I put them back on my phone?

3. How do I assure that I don't have such a large buildup of pointless Documents and Data again?

iPhone 4S, iOS 7.0.6

Posted on Mar 19, 2014 10:17 AM

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Answer 1

AmishCake

Level 6

9,648 points

Mar 19, 2014 11:24 AM in response to kirby7979

I always advise backing up to both iCloud and iTunes in case something goes wrong with one or the other.

Read this User Tip doc by Kappy on dealing with "other" issues: https://discussions.apple.com/docs/DOC-5142

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Answer 2

FoxFifth

Level 10

475,401 points

Mar 19, 2014 11:29 AM in response to kirby7979

In addition to backing up to iCloud have you also set it to sync the Contacts to iCloud (i.e., can you log onto https://www.icloud.com and see your conacts there)? Additionally you can sync them to your computer. If you have a Windows computer the following has instructions for doing it via iTunes: http://support.apple.com/kb/PH12317 If you have a Mac computer or Windows computer you can sync contacts to that via iTunes. Once they are on the computer they can also be included in the computer backup if you want to feel even safer.

The contacts should come back on your phone when you restore. iCloud sync will also put contacts back on your phone automatically.

In my opinion, for Contacts and Photos a backup is great and two is better, but there is nothing like having them where you can actually see them and a backup alone doesn't accomplish that.

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Answer 3

Mar 19, 2014 11:42 AM in response to FoxFifth

FoxFifth wrote:

In my opinion, for Contacts and Photos a backup is great and two is better, but there is nothing like having them where you can actually see them and a backup alone doesn't accomplish that.

Agreed. There seems to be a common misconception between "backup" and "syncing", and how to use iCloud for this purpose.

While a backup can recover most things on your device, it does not do a complete backup of your contacts (as acknowledged by Apple), whether you backup to iCloud or backup to your computer.

To safeguard your contacts and be able to recover them, you need to be syncing them to some external source (iCloud, Google, etc.) and then restore your connection to that source to recover your contacts.

Of course, this does not help you if you accidentally delete or change a contact, since that event will sync to the native source. To truly safeguard your contacts, you need to periodically export them to a file which can be imported back to recover them, and of course backup that file regularly.

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