Gmail wasn't syncing, contacts lost. Help!

So I use gmail sync to store my iPhone contacts. For a while, it had been saying 'cannot fetch mail' or something, but I didn't care, because I never used the mail function, just for contact storage.

Anyway, I signed out of gmail on my iPhone and signed back in to stop that annoying message happening, and disaster my newly created contacts disappeared. Since that message 'cannot fetch mail' had been appearing, it hadn't been syncing my newly created contacts to gmail, so when I signed back in, they were gone.

Is there anything I can do to retrieve them, because to me, they don't seem to be backed-up anywhere?