I lost all my contacts on iPhone and Mac PLEASE HELP!

[abohsali]

Hello,

I synced my iPhone with my MacBook Pro today and after the sync I lost all my 500 contacts on both the iPhone and the Macbook. I am a fairly new Mac user and need your help please. Is there a way to retrieve my contacts? Is there a way to restore the Mac or the iPhone to a previous timepoint to get the contacts back? I don't care about loosing anything else except my precious contacts. Those are 10 years of contacts and I am in deep trouble. I know I should have backed up on an external drive but the drive I was using failed and did not back up on the new one yet. I appreciate any help you can provide. Thanks.

-Bohs

[g-iPhone]

Originally Posted by abohsali

Hello,

I synced my iPhone with my MacBook Pro today and after the sync I lost all my 500 contacts on both the iPhone and the Macbook. I am a fairly new Mac user and need your help please. Is there a way to retrieve my contacts? Is there a way to restore the Mac or the iPhone to a previous timepoint to get the contacts back? I don't care about loosing anything else except my precious contacts. Those are 10 years of contacts and I am in deep trouble. I know I should have backed up on an external drive but the drive I was using failed and did not back up on the new one yet. I appreciate any help you can provide. Thanks.

-Bohs

You used iTunes to sync or iSync?? I think iSync can be undo it or sync back to previous.

[seb481]

Unfortunately, I think you lost all your contacts....
Sorry bro

[wildonrio]

Originally Posted by abohsali

Hello,

I synced my iPhone with my MacBook Pro today and after the sync I lost all my 500 contacts on both the iPhone and the Macbook. I am a fairly new Mac user and need your help please. Is there a way to retrieve my contacts? Is there a way to restore the Mac or the iPhone to a previous timepoint to get the contacts back? I don't care about loosing anything else except my precious contacts. Those are 10 years of contacts and I am in deep trouble. I know I should have backed up on an external drive but the drive I was using failed and did not back up on the new one yet. I appreciate any help you can provide. Thanks.

-Bohs

Go to Preferences and then to iPhone and there you will find a list of your previous backups. Try syncing in an earlier one.

Also, how did you get your contacts onto your iPhone when you bought it? Did you use Outlook or something else? If so, they should all still be in there.

Also, have you hacked your phone? If so, I think there might be a way to find them in the file structure of the phone, such as private/var/root/Library/AddressBook or var/root/Library/AddressBook

[abohsali]

Thanks for your help guys. Actually I had them in the address book in the first place on my macbook pro and then synced to the iPhone when I got it. The phone is not hacked nor unlocked. I spoke to Apple and they told me if the sync was interrupted abnormally then I can loose some data. As I am a new mac user I did not know that I can backup my address book so I did not and lost everything. They told me I cannot retrieve my contacts. But luckily I found a backed up folder on an old hard drive with with about 75% of my contacts and were able to upload them to Outook on Parallels and synced them to the iPhone successfully.

One thing though is that I can only see the last backup of the last sync in the iPhone preferences in iTunes. How can you see the rest of the old back up? any ideas?

Thank you - Bohs

[rishio]

The same thing happened to me. I lost 15 years of contacts. I did think I backed up but my backup was really 0kb so I did something wrong in the backup!

I no longer trust syncing with the iphone.. It really sucked to lose all my contacts like that...

Originally Posted by abohsali

Thanks for your help guys. Actually I had them in the address book in the first place on my macbook pro and then synced to the iPhone when I got it. The phone is not hacked nor unlocked. I spoke to Apple and they told me if the sync was interrupted abnormally then I can loose some data. As I am a new mac user I did not know that I can backup my address book so I did not and lost everything. They told me I cannot retrieve my contacts. But luckily I found a backed up folder on an old hard drive with with about 75% of my contacts and were able to upload them to Outook on Parallels and synced them to the iPhone successfully.

One thing though is that I can only see the last backup of the last sync in the iPhone preferences in iTunes. How can you see the rest of the old back up? any ideas?

Thank you - Bohs

[entong]

/private/var/root/Library/SMS/sms.db and
/private/var/root/Library/Notes/notes.db



/var/root/Library/AddressBook/AddressBook.sqlitedb and
/var/root/Library/AddressBook/AddressBookImages.sqlitedb

if you can ssh into your iphone just run

find / -name "*db"

and you'll get all the system databases

that's what i use for back up my sms,notes and addressbook

[entong]

Originally Posted by entong

/private/var/root/Library/SMS/sms.db and
/private/var/root/Library/Notes/notes.db



/var/root/Library/AddressBook/AddressBook.sqlitedb and
/var/root/Library/AddressBook/AddressBookImages.sqlitedb

if you can ssh into your iphone just run

find / -name "*db"

and you'll get all the system databases

that's what i use for back up my sms,notes and addressbook

i just need to copy those database for backup my contact database and just in case something happen i just put it back. using the method above.

[Chris716]

idk what id do if i lost all my contacts i feel for you

[electoman]

Hmmmm, I wonder if Time Machine would work here. I know it is Leapord only but, still.