Lost contacts after deleting an exchange email

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Level 1

20 points

Lost contacts after deleting an exchange email

Hi all,

I changed my job a year ago but I kept the exchange email on my iPhone although I don't have access to the email anymore since that time. Why? At the beginning it was simply to keep the latest emails I received before leaving the old company.

Today, I deleted the exchange account from my iPhone and lost many contacts. I guess some of the contacts were stored on the exchange account and not on iCloud. There was a local copy on my iPhone somehow and deleting the Exchange account deleted the contacts associated to that account. That being said, I am pretty sure I once synced everything on iCloud to avoid this.

The crazy thing is that even contacts added a week ago are gone. My question is: Is it possible that contacts added lately on the iPhone are added to the Exchange account even if the Exchange account is not accessible since a year?

Any explanation would be helpful to figure out if I can still hope to retrieve some of the lost data or not.

Than you

iPhone X, iOS 11.4

Posted on Jul 8, 2018 3:58 AM

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Answer 1

Best reply

Oussaden Author

Level 1

20 points

Jul 9, 2018 8:28 AM in response to Oussaden

I found a solution to my problem, and I am sharing what I did in case others run into the same problem.

1. I backed up my iPhone

2. Restored the iPhone using the 6 month old backup

3. Found all the contacts (icloud and exchange) as of 6 months ago.

4. Downloaded an iPhone app called "My Contacts Backup" and exported all the contacts (vCard format) and emailed the export to myself (using the app).

5. Imported the whole export archive to iCloud. I have a mac so all I needed to do is double click the export archive and it was open in the app "Contacts". I was asked if I wanted to keep the duplicates or update the duplicate contacts. I chose the latter

6. I waited a few minutes so it's synced to iCloud. You can check that all the missing contacts are now accessible on www.icloud.com

7. Restored (back) my iPhone using the latest backup (the one from today).

8. Logged into iCloud on my iPhone and all the contacts were there.

PS1: Some of the contacts added during the last 6 months might have been lost but I do prefer this option rather than loosing 2000+ contacts that were linked to the Exchange account.

PS2: If you still want to try to recover some of the lost contacts (data in general), you can use some tools such as Dr.Fone. The free version might be enough if all you want is to recover some missing contacts.

Lessons learned:

1. Always check on you iPhone under Settings --> Contacts --> Default Account. In my case, although I wasn't working for the company I sued to work for. The default account for storing contacts was the Exchange account. I changed it now to iCloud.

2. Before you delete an exchange account check that you are not deleting contacts, reminders, notes, etc. that might be linked to this account.

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Answer 2

Rossnic

Level 2

428 points

Jul 8, 2018 4:14 AM in response to Oussaden

I think your assessment is spot on unfortuantly. The data is probably lost. Saying that you may be able to salvage the contacts if you have a backup of the phone before the change was made? It'd probably be easiest to just get a program that can access the backups and extract it from there.

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Answer 3

Oussaden Author

Level 1

20 points

Jul 8, 2018 6:47 AM in response to Rossnic

Thank you for the quick response.

I should have a 6 month old backup on my Mac.

1- Do you think if I restore that backup I will have all the missing contacts?

2- is there a way to restore only contacts from the old backup?

3- if not how should I proceed if I want to keep the photo folder and other apps as it is today. I mean restoring the old backup will mean losing all the latest photos...

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Lost contacts after deleting an exchange email

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