Need help recovering contacts

[darkcyber]

Long story short...My wife and daughter have Iphones. My wife has an IPhone 4S and my daughter has an IPhone 5. Both phones are connected to the same ITunes account. My daughter had a lot of my wife's contacts on her phone and she deleted them from her phone. I doing so, this somehow deleted them from my wive's phone as well. Is there anyway to recover these on my wive's phone? I recently made a new ICloud backup of my wive's phone getting ready to move her to a new IPhone 5S. I ran the basic backup that comes up on ICloud and I cannot find contacts anywhere. I went into ICloud on her phone and turned on contacts under ICloud. I do have some older local backups of her phone from back in January, but she has added several new contact from a job change recently and needs those contacts.

Help appreciated.

 

[scifan57]

Unless the missing contacts were backed up somewhere there is, unfortunately, no way to recover them. If your wife knows anybody at her job that also has these contacts she may be able to get them that way, then manually enter them on her phone.

scifan57, iPhone Forums Moderator

 

[Pinkpoison]

I know it isn't much help at the moment but i always keep a list of my contacts on paper so if the worst happens i can manually put them back.

 

[darkcyber]

I did a backup by turning on ICloud and turning on contacts, but for some reason I can't find contacts. Where in ICloud would I look for the contacts to see if they are there. Also, how could my daughter deleting these off her phone removed them from my wive's phone?

Also, when I do a backup in ITunes to the local computer does it backup the contacts then?

 

[hoben02]

Do you and your daughter share the same itunes account login?

 

[darkcyber]

Do you and your daughter share the same itunes account login?

Yes, they do.

I just did a backup of my wive's using ICloud a couple of days ago and I checked "Mail, Contacts, Calendar, and Tasks with Outlook". Would that not have backed up the contacts somewhere? The pc I am using is Windows 8 and I do not have Outlook setup. Can I pull her contacts out from an old ITunes backup?

 

[hoben02]

Well that could explain if she made changes then icloud synced up and made changes to all iphones hooked up to that same account

 

[darkcyber]

Well that could explain if she made changes then icloud synced up and made changes to all iphones hooked up to that same account

Yes, that does explain it. Now, is there anywhere I can look to see if I can recover her contacts? I have found some programs that will scan the old ITunes backup and I can see most of them, but I need to see if I can get the most recent ones.

 

[xrayeyes]

www.icloud.com You will find your account there.

 

[darkcyber]

OK, I recovered most of the contacts via one of these programs that will scan and display the stuff from an old ITunes backup. Now, what is a good program to back up all of the contacts from your IPhone to a computer (windows based) or somewhere off the IPhone in case this happens again.

 

[xrayeyes]

Create separate accounts and use iCloud. Or use an email service such as yahoo or gmail and then sync through iTunes. If you have Verizon, they also offer a "contacts" program.

 

[darkcyber]

Create separate accounts and use iCloud. Or use an email service such as yahoo or gmail and then sync through iTunes. If you have Verizon, they also offer a "contacts" program.

Well, I do have a Gmail account on her phone and most all of her contacts, except the newest ones, are in there. But I have tried and tried to get Gmail to sync up those contacts on her phone and no good. Followed the exact steps and they do not come up. Went to groups and did the refresh and they still will not come up.

Now, she is saying all of her Notes are missing from her Notes app. I did a backup with ICloud before all this happened last Monday October 21st, which seems to be pretty USELESS (ICloud that is), because I can't find anything that it backed up. After I did the backup, I actually went in and looked at ALL of the contacts and it shows that they were there in the backup, but now, there are no contacts at all in ICloud.

Does the regular ICloud backup not backup Notes as well? I'm sorry, I am not an Apple person my wife is, and this is making me even less of one everyday. Apple's backup is total junk...it doesn't seem to backup anything.

 

[xrayeyes]

http://www.iphoneforums.net/forum/iphone-5s-forum-116/help-email-60675/ Read this concerning Gmail. Not sure if you are still able to do so, but you would sync the Gmail contacts when you are connected to iTunes.

As far as the notes, go under each email service on your wife's phone and see which one has "notes" enabled to sync. General>Mail,Contacts,Calendar>(yahoo,gmail,outlook) Once you see which service is enabled, go to the email service online (not on phone) and find the "notes" folder. They should be there. This happend to me and I turned off the notes on my yahoo account to keep them from syncing and getting deleted from my phone.

Did you go online under www.icloud.com and sign in to your account? You should be able see your contacts there. Is the "contacts" tab "ON" under iCloud on the phone? I don't think you can actually "see" everything that is backed up on iCloud, rather you would connect your phone to iTunes and choose to restore from the iCloud back up.

 

[xrayeyes]

Huh, just noticed the newest version of iTunes took away the option to sync contacts! I'll be darned! It used to be an option...sorry for the confusion!

 

[darkcyber]

http://www.iphoneforums.net/forum/iphone-5s-forum-116/help-email-60675/ Read this concerning Gmail. Not sure if you are still able to do so, but you would sync the Gmail contacts when you are connected to iTunes.

As far as the notes, go under each email service on your wife's phone and see which one has "notes" enabled to sync. General>Mail,Contacts,Calendar>(yahoo,gmail,outlook) Once you see which service is enabled, go to the email service online (not on phone) and find the "notes" folder. They should be there. This happend to me and I turned off the notes on my yahoo account to keep them from syncing and getting deleted from my phone.

Did you go online under www.icloud.com and sign in to your account? You should be able see your contacts there. Is the "contacts" tab "ON" under iCloud on the phone? I don't think you can actually "see" everything that is backed up on iCloud, rather you would connect your phone to iTunes and choose to restore from the iCloud back up.

Her Notes was syncing to Gmail. I logged into her Gmail account on the computer they are all there. Now I just have to get them back on her phone...lol! As far as the contacts and logging into ICloud. Yes, I logged into ICloud and click on Contacts and only the contacts that were left after my daughter deleted all the ones see didn't need are there...about 20 something. I hooked up my wife's phone last Monday and made a backup of everything to ICloud getting ready to move her from her IPhone 4S to the new 5S...I did back it all up, but obvisously ICloud didn't take it for some reason. I even created her an ICloud email address when it prompted me to. I looked at all the contacts in ICloud afterwards to make sure they were there. The only thing I can figure is when my daughter deleted them from her phone, her phone was linked to ICloud and deleted them. Don't know why the backup didn't hold. Very Frustrating to say the least.