I backed up my wife's iPhone 5s for the first time to her laptop, using iTunes. When I resotred it, all of her contacts are gone. Where does iTunes store Contacts?

iTunes does not deal with contacts directly. It provides a path to sync contacts to another Personal information manager (Apple Contacts / Outlook, etc).

Hopefully she was using either iCloud, or another online service (Yahoo, Hotmail, Google), and you just need to set that back up.

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I suspect that when you updated your wife's iPhone to the latest iOS and performed the back-up, that her contacts may have been lost during that process. If the contacts were backed-up to her computer, you'll find them in Address Book.

Open 'Finder'. In the 'Title Bar' go to 'View' and then 'View Options'. Select 'Show Library Folder'. Then go to 'User '> 'Library' > 'Application Support' > 'Address Book' > 'Metadata'. If there are any files in the folder, highlight one and hit the space bar. That will show what data is stored on that particular file, such as name, phone number email address etc.

If the folder is empty, then sadly her contacts are gone.

Yes. That means there is no place that you would find any of the contact information on her machine unless she had explicitly set that up herself before hand. If the contacts were not synced to her gmail account or iCloud account, they're undoubtedly gone.

Ha, a new iPhone would take the sting out of losing one's contacts!

If she is/was using Gmail, first check her Google contacts to see if her contacts actually are there (use a computer to check, not the iPhone).

• If you don't see them in her default contacts group within her Gmail account, check the "Other Contacts" group since Google will keep a record of who you've been sending email to and will put the contact in Other if they're not in the main group.
• From the list of Other contacts, you can select the ones you want to keep and then click "Add to My Contacts" and that will migrate them from Other to the main contacts group.
• Then it would be just a matter of enabling Contacts in her iPhone's Gmail account setting, but give it time to sync from Google (up to an hour).
• If you're still not seeing her Google contacts show up on her iPhone, go into Mail settings on the iPhone and change the Fetch schedule to "Every 15 Minutes" to kick-start the sync process, it should then sync up within 15 minutes. Once the contacts sync, you may want to change this to every 30 minutes, or manual, since Fetching more frequently consumes a bit more battery (I keep mine on 15 though with no troubles, but I'm on a 6s Plus so battery is less of an issue).

Good luck! (this may delay her 6s acquisition if successful, so she'll probably hate me ;-)

texasvet54 wrote:

Thanks all!!!!

I guess this falls into the category of "every lesson I've ever learned in life has cost me money." Now my wife wants a new iPhone 6s since her 5s is missing some calls and her contacts are gone. She knows that a new iPhone won't bring back her contacts, but I think that she wants to harass me since I should have taken better care of her contacts. Oh well!!!!

So learn the lesson, download 'My Contacts Backup' (from the app store) install it and use it, then she won't lose them again and you'll be the hero again 🙂

It's free, so it won't cost you money.

It also useful to remember where they were stored and then look in that place (did you actually look in Google Contacts on the web to see if they are there?)

They are coming from the Previous Recipients list, they can be restored to the Address Book (this is on a Mac), they only include email addresses though, on an iPhone (in Messages) there is no simple way other than what you are doing now.

You really should use iCloud (or Gmail) for storing contacts, and you really should backup. Download My Contacts Backup from the App Store and use it from now on.