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Lost all Contacts on my iPhone, no iCloud backup available

A few hundred contacts disappeared off my iPhone yesterday. I looked at a few threads in this forum and tried to restore an archive of my contacts from iCloud. All I see is "No archives available". iCloud Contact sync worked great until June 26, 2018. Any ideas?


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iPhone X, iOS 11.3.1

Posted on Jun 27, 2018 3:44 PM

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Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Posted on Jun 28, 2018 12:59 PM

It turns out you were right in your first response.


My contacts suddenly restored themselves a few hours ago. It turns out I did have Outlook integration turned on, and my missing contacts were from Outlook and NOT iCloud.


When I looked yesterday at Settings -> Contact -> Default Account, I only saw iCloud. But today I see iCould and Exchange (and I did not make any changes to installing/uninstalling Outlook). There must have been an outage with Office365.


Thanks. Sorry for posting this issue in the wrong forum. Hopefully this might help others with Microsoft Outlook issues.

6 replies
Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Jun 28, 2018 12:59 PM in response to leoperales

It turns out you were right in your first response.


My contacts suddenly restored themselves a few hours ago. It turns out I did have Outlook integration turned on, and my missing contacts were from Outlook and NOT iCloud.


When I looked yesterday at Settings -> Contact -> Default Account, I only saw iCloud. But today I see iCould and Exchange (and I did not make any changes to installing/uninstalling Outlook). There must have been an outage with Office365.


Thanks. Sorry for posting this issue in the wrong forum. Hopefully this might help others with Microsoft Outlook issues.

Jun 28, 2018 5:05 AM in response to Sperl

Did you recently delete any other external accounts from your device, like Google or Outlook? I’m thinking of the possibility that you have your contacts synced to one of those types of accounts and not iCloud. That happened to me once, which is why I’m asking.


If that’s not the case and you did have the contacts synced to iCloud, then there is no way to restore what doesn’t exist.

Jun 28, 2018 8:23 AM in response to leoperales

My phone does not have any other accounts active for Contacts. I keep my Apple contacts separate from Google and Microsoft.


The only other weird thing happened that day, was that I my home Mac Mini died and got stuck in an infinite reboot loop. I have not been able revive the Mac Mini. Maybe it was responsible for a bad iCloud sync? Seems far-fetched.


Is there a log anywhere in iCloud that would tell me which device requested a sync that day and deleted contacts?

Lost all Contacts on my iPhone, no iCloud backup available

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