Contacts deleted by merge function. (Help!)

While using the contacts desktop program (v9.0), I selected "Card" > "Look for duplicates..." and selected "Merge"

This resulted in all my contacts (a couple of thousands) being reduced to only 29 contacts!

This has now spread to all my devices. 😟

I recently changed phones and my backup is to iCloud, so I need to roll back to what it was yesterday.

Is there a way to contact Apple to restore yesterday's status before the synch? Needless to say, I REALLY need my contacts back.

This is really a worrysome issue! I did nothing wrong here (except not having some sort of external backup). For the future... how does one backup to an external, place safe from synch-deletion?

Thanks in advance!

Eric

OS: El Capitan 10.11.6
Contacts app. version: v9.0