Lost my contacts

[mopatops]

I own a Mac and an iPhone and am using iCloud to sync my contacts between the both. A day or two ago, I was on the Mac and saw that there were two entries for each contact. My phone address book showed each contact once. In hindsight, I should have waited out the bug but instead I deleted one of the duplicates on my Mac and confirmed everything stayed normal on the iPhone. I then deleted every other entry on my Mac until everything appeared to be synced again. Then 10 minutes ago, all my contacts on both my Mac and iPhone disappeared. I checked the last wifi to iCloud back up time on my phone and it was 3 hours ago. I've turned my phone off just to ensure it won't overwrite my backup. Does anyone know of any way to just access my contacts from the backup or am I going to need a full restore? I've never restored from a backup before so if I do restore it, will I lose any data, settings etc?

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

EDIT: I've just looked and all my calendars are still there so it seems to be a problem with contacts and not my account. Also, iCloud.com is showing no contacts.

 

[frunkis54]

I own a Mac and an iPhone and am using iCloud to sync my contacts between the both. A day or two ago, I was on the Mac and saw that there were two entries for each contact. My phone address book showed each contact once. In hindsight, I should have waited out the bug but instead I deleted one of the duplicates on my Mac and confirmed everything stayed normal on the iPhone. I then deleted every other entry on my Mac until everything appeared to be synced again. Then 10 minutes ago, all my contacts on both my Mac and iPhone disappeared. I checked the last wifi to iCloud back up time on my phone and it was 3 hours ago. I've turned my phone off just to ensure it won't overwrite my backup. Does anyone know of any way to just access my contacts from the backup or am I going to need a full restore? I've never restored from a backup before so if I do restore it, will I lose any data, settings etc?

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

EDIT: I've just looked and all my calendars are still there so it seems to be a problem with contacts and not my account. Also, iCloud.com is showing no contacts.

the same thing happened to me i had to pull all my contacts back from time machine.

 

[sakau2007]

Yeah, you may just need to get them from a backup.

Just don't tell me you are one of those people who don't have a backup of your contact list and post facebook status updates like "NEW PHONE NEED NUMBERS" Every time I see one of those, I have to check my calendar and make sure I didn't fall into 1995.

 

[mopatops]

I am using time machine to back up my Mac. When entering time machine and going back a couple of hours, do I need to then locate the contact files somewhere or just click restore? I really don't mind losing a couple of hours of itunes play counts and browsing history haha.

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Yeah, you may just need to get them from a backup.

Just don't tell me you are one of those people who don't have a backup of your contact list and post facebook status updates like "NEW PHONE NEED NUMBERS" Every time I see one of those, I have to check my calendar and make sure I didn't fall into 1995.

Ha, well I only purchased an iPhone 4 after the release of iOS5. Knowing I had everything backed up on my Mac and iCloud left me complacent. Shouldn't have underestimated teething problems!

 

[mopatops]

So I just went into address book with time machine and restored my contacts. Was fine for a minute or so but as soon as it synced with iCloud, all my contacts duplicated on the Mac again. Did you get the same thing, frunkis? Hoping they'll just disappear on their own in a day or two..

 

[Richard L]

Duplicate contacts

I have had the same problem. There seems no way to overwrite iCloud contacts unless you drop an exported version of your address book saved as a vCal file into the actual iCloud version. Have posted details of this elsewhere in the forum under duplicate contracts. It seems strange that there is no facility to update your complete address book on iCloud as you could in MobileMe.

 

[stylinexpat]

Do you also have Whatsapp?

 

[ladytonya]

That's odd. After I read this, I checked both my phone and my MacBook Pro as I had a similar problem with iCal but hadn't even looked at Contacts. If I go into Address Book on my Mac, if I click on All Contacts I have duplicates but if I click on All iCloud they're all just there once. The weird thing is that I have two All iCloud tabs in there. If I look on my phone, I have All Contacts, From My Mac, and iCloud. All Contacts and iCloud are both correct, my contacts are all there and just once. If I click All from My Mac, it's empty.

In iCal, I have my Mac showing Calendar, Home, and Work under On My Mac. If I choose anything from iCloud, then my entries are all doubled. On my phone, I have All iCloud, Calendar, Work, Home all chosen and all my entries are there only once.

You would think there would be some consistency between iCal and Address Book between the Mac and the iPhone with iCloud. I like iCloud in theory but I don't think it works right quite yet. Now, I'm afraid to turn it off because I don't want to lose anything. Very frustrating!