Itunes backup deleted my photos, contacts

This basically started because I wanted to remove my previous work exchange, which is still a problem of it's own. This ended up deleting all my contacts. To restore some of these contacts, I turned to an older backup on iTunes. When clicked, a message pops up saying "This will only restore contacts, messages... not firmware" to confirm. I went ahead only to find out most of my contacts are gone! most of my photos are gone!

Why is there no warning about this?? I am trying so hard to retrieve my lost contacts or photos, I don't know what to do. Please help!