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Hey, I'm using an iPhone 3GS
I hadn't signed in to iCloud earlier, and had a lot of contacts on my iPhone. I signed in to iCloud, turned on contacts, selected "merge" in the pop up that follows hoping they would get backed up to iCloud but all of them got erased instead. How can i recover them?
iPhone 3GS, iOS 8.4.1
Open Contact and check in the upper left corner to see if you are viewing all contacts, or just one group.
I am viewing all contacts! I have google contacts and now iCloud, both of which are checked. There were lots of contacts not backed up on google and were just on my phone which i have lost.
What happens if you log into iCloud on the computer and view the contacts? Are they there?
I have around 70 contacts that i had backed up on iCloud a long time back which are being displayed on iCloud on my computer as well as the phone, i had 700 contacts before i signed in to iCloud on my phone of which 250 were google contacts, the rest were just saved on the phone. Now i have 250 of the google contacts + 70 of the old iCloud contacts being displayed on my phone. I have a back up of my phone on iTunes which is also 2-3 months old so the contacts i saved in the last 2-3 months will be lost if i recover from there.
I'm guessing that when you merged, you merged the existing iCloud and Google Contacts and that may not have included the contacts that you had on the phone that were not backed up anywhere. When making major changes like you did, involving the phone and two separate cloud services, you should have done them one step at a time and ensure that everything was backed up. I would have also backed up the phone before attempting the merge, so you would not have risked losing anything, if something had gone wrong. I'm not sure exactly what it was that caused the error, but as I said, it seems that the merge did not include everything you wanted it to.
When I merged, the contacts saved on my iPhone were replaced by the ones on iCloud, iCloud and google contacts haven't merged. There was no warning for this either! Contacts just disappeared! Any idea how I can get them back?
I was actually trying to back up the contacts on my phone to iCloud! xD
How were you getting contacts from the iPhone to iCloud to start with? Were you syncing them and that is what prompted the merge? There seem to be more than one thing going on here. You say you were trying to backup, but you were trying to put contacts on iCloud and I'm not sure what you were doing in what order. Please try and detail exactly what you were doing and in what order to see if we can figure out what happened. It doesn't sound like the merge worked, especially since you see the same contacts in iCloud and on the phone and they do not include what was originally on the phone.
Hey thanks, I've restored whatever few contacts I could from the old back up I had. I was trying to transfer iPhone contacts to iCloud so that i'd have the contacts even if i lost my device. While trying to do so the merge happened and I lost the contacts.
Now I have some contacts which are just on my iPhone, how can I transfer these to Google contacts or iCloud? Preferably Google.
Contacts deleted after signing in to iCloud
