This is mainly a rant, and I'm sorry if this is the wrong place.
Short story time. Pop the popcorn! So... My dad has had issues with using iCloud.com to delete contacts in bulk from his phone. When he deletes a contact, sometimes it pulls off his phone, other times it doesn't. If he refreshes the iCloud.com page, a new contact called "No Name" will replace the one that he deleted.
So in my duties as a son who's decently versed in electronics, especially apple, I seek to help him out. Nothing is working to resolve his issue. But the processes that I'm telling him to do work just fine for me! So I account it to user error.
I continue to experiment with iCloud and here is where I fck up. I've got all my contacts all nice and dandy on all my devices. so What I attempt to do is turn off iCloud contact syncing on my iPhone. I am prompted to download my contacts onto my phone, I agree. THEN I go to iCloud.com and select all my contacts in that list and hit delete. Ok they're all gone, but still on my phone. Well I turn iCloud contact syncing back on.. it asked me to merge, so I agree. Then I notice that I'm legit missing at least 80 contacts on my phone and iCloud. uh oh. Didn't back up the contacts or do a full backup on my phone to a computer.
Next I try the "Restore Contacts" portion on iCloud.com and choose the most recent iCloud backup from 7/6, which SHOULD contain all the contacts I had before. WRONG. now I'm missing like 200+ contacts! and some I use every single day. Now I'm kind of freaking out. I wait it out over night just to ensure it's not quite done transferring. no progress. I did do a full backup of my phone last night with ~480+ contacts, so I figured I could restore my iPhone to that backup. NOPE. that doesn't work either as it fails at the end of the backup. Great. Not only has iCloud backups failed me, but the contact restoring / backups have failed me as well.
Keep in mind, I'm on iOS 13.6 public beta 3. The backup I was trying to restore from was also public beta 3. Another mistake. So I try to enter recovery mode to revert back to 13.5.1. That works, but obviously I can't attempt to restore to my backup because that's on 13.6 public beta 3.
I reinstall the public beta profile, re-upgrade to 13.6 beta 3, still no luck restoring to the backup from last night.
NOW I'm choosing to restore to a full backup I made over 2 years ago.... I did pull all my photos off, so I wouldn't be loosing much, but would hope to regain all my contacts for the most part, sans a few years. I have text messages on my laptop I can match up for whatever I'm missing. Welp that restore to backup also fails.
My next course of action ahead would be to:
1. Do a complete wipe of the phone back to 13.5.1, then try to recover to the backup from two years ago.
2. bite the bullet of lost contacts and rebuild from what I have right now and try to piece it back together.
Complete fail on both my part and iClouds. What's the point of iCloud contact backup if it's not going to backup the entire list of contacts?? All of my contacts were created on my iPhone and synced to iCloud. None were created using a different email address, and none were left on the phone itself and NOT synced to iCloud.
I'm at a loss for words..
Short story time. Pop the popcorn! So... My dad has had issues with using iCloud.com to delete contacts in bulk from his phone. When he deletes a contact, sometimes it pulls off his phone, other times it doesn't. If he refreshes the iCloud.com page, a new contact called "No Name" will replace the one that he deleted.
So in my duties as a son who's decently versed in electronics, especially apple, I seek to help him out. Nothing is working to resolve his issue. But the processes that I'm telling him to do work just fine for me! So I account it to user error.
I continue to experiment with iCloud and here is where I fck up. I've got all my contacts all nice and dandy on all my devices. so What I attempt to do is turn off iCloud contact syncing on my iPhone. I am prompted to download my contacts onto my phone, I agree. THEN I go to iCloud.com and select all my contacts in that list and hit delete. Ok they're all gone, but still on my phone. Well I turn iCloud contact syncing back on.. it asked me to merge, so I agree. Then I notice that I'm legit missing at least 80 contacts on my phone and iCloud. uh oh. Didn't back up the contacts or do a full backup on my phone to a computer.
Next I try the "Restore Contacts" portion on iCloud.com and choose the most recent iCloud backup from 7/6, which SHOULD contain all the contacts I had before. WRONG. now I'm missing like 200+ contacts! and some I use every single day. Now I'm kind of freaking out. I wait it out over night just to ensure it's not quite done transferring. no progress. I did do a full backup of my phone last night with ~480+ contacts, so I figured I could restore my iPhone to that backup. NOPE. that doesn't work either as it fails at the end of the backup. Great. Not only has iCloud backups failed me, but the contact restoring / backups have failed me as well.
Keep in mind, I'm on iOS 13.6 public beta 3. The backup I was trying to restore from was also public beta 3. Another mistake. So I try to enter recovery mode to revert back to 13.5.1. That works, but obviously I can't attempt to restore to my backup because that's on 13.6 public beta 3.
I reinstall the public beta profile, re-upgrade to 13.6 beta 3, still no luck restoring to the backup from last night.
NOW I'm choosing to restore to a full backup I made over 2 years ago.... I did pull all my photos off, so I wouldn't be loosing much, but would hope to regain all my contacts for the most part, sans a few years. I have text messages on my laptop I can match up for whatever I'm missing. Welp that restore to backup also fails.
My next course of action ahead would be to:
1. Do a complete wipe of the phone back to 13.5.1, then try to recover to the backup from two years ago.
2. bite the bullet of lost contacts and rebuild from what I have right now and try to piece it back together.
Complete fail on both my part and iClouds. What's the point of iCloud contact backup if it's not going to backup the entire list of contacts?? All of my contacts were created on my iPhone and synced to iCloud. None were created using a different email address, and none were left on the phone itself and NOT synced to iCloud.
I'm at a loss for words..