If you’ve lost an important contact from your iPhone, there’s no need to worry just yet. We show you how to recover deleted iPhone contacts using iCloud, iTunes, or a third-party tool.
Next, we will explain these three ways for how to recover deleted contacts on iPhone one by one. Please read on.
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One of the unavoidable incidents that can happen while we are using our iPhones is accidental deletion of important data, such as our contacts. Sometimes we only have our fingers and our wandering minds to blame, and sometimes it was done because our device got damaged, or the most common of them all: forgot to back up our iPhone.
Whatever the reason is, such happenings can lead us to become quite frustrated and panicky, especially if we lost important contacts, right? Continue to read, and you can find out the best solutions of how to recover deleted contacts on iPhone
Solution 1: How to Recover Deleted Contacts on iPhone with iCloud
If you just deleted precious contacts on your iPhone, then your next best bet is to Restore your iPhone from iCloud backup to help you restore your lost contacts! Restoring iPhone from iCloud backup is perhaps the simplest of all methods by which to restore deleted contacts. However, it’s also the riskiest, because it will lead to complete data loss from your iPhone, and your iPhone will go back to factory settings.
Basically, your iPhone makes backups regularly, if you’ve permitted it to. As such, you can check to see what the latest backup is. If you find a backup from before you deleted your contacts, you can use it to overwrite your iPhone. This means your iPhone will begin to resemble what it was like at the time of the last backup. Any recent data you might have will be lost.
To avoid that, you need to make a separate copy of all the data on your iPhone since the date of your last backup.
Check to see if your last iCloud backup is before you deleted the contact.
Step 1: Launch Settings, tap on your profile at the top.
Step 2: Select iCloud > Manage Storage > Backups.
Step 3: You’ll see a list of backups for your devices and can tap on the one for your iPhone to see when it was last backed up.
Step 4: Even if you can find a suitable backup, bear in mind that you’ll need to completely reset your iPhone to factory settings before setting up your iPhone using the older backup. You will lose any data you’ve added since the backup, so be sure to separately save copies of any recent files you want to keep.
Step 5: To reset your iPhone go to General > Reset > Erase All Content and Settings. Once your iPhone restarts and begins the setup process, choose to restore from an iCloud backup and pick the backup from before you erased your contacts.
Solution 2: How to Recover deleted iPhone contacts from an iTunes or Finder backup
If you don’t want to rely on automatic iCloud backups, or don’t have enough iCloud storage space for them, you can back up your iPhone to your PC or Mac using iTunes (or Finder in macOS Catalina or later). Just as with the previous iCloud method, this requires having a backup from before you deleted the contacts and the resetting your iPhone, restoring from that backup. You’ll lose everything from after the backup.
Step 1: Connect your iPhone to the PC or Mac you’ve backed it up with. If iTunes does not open automatically, open it up manually. (If you’re on a Mac running Catalina or later, open Finder instead.)
Step 2: Click on the iPhone icon in the top left-hand corner. On a Mac running macOS Catalina or later, select your device from the lefthand menu bar in Finder.
Step 3: Now choose Restore Backup. All the data you previously backed up will now replace the data on your iPhone. It will take a few minutes. As long as you haven’t backed up since deleting those contacts, they should now appear in the contacts app on your iPhone.
Solution3: How to recover deleted iPhone contacts using a third-party tool
If you find that the previous options don’t help, it’s time to go nuclear and employ a third-party software tool. Bear in mind that some of these tools come at a price, and there is no guarantee they will work – but if you’re desperate, this is the next step.
Even after you ‘delete’ contacts they remain on your handset until overwritten, so you should be able to recover deleted iPhone contacts using these utilities. But, as we say, there are no guarantees.
The best advice if you’re using one of these tools is to do so as quickly as possible. The longer you leave it, the more likely it is that you’ll have written over the relevant section of memory.
How to Make Sure You Don’t Lose Precious Contacts Next Time
There is only one answer to avoiding losing precious contacts (and other important files, for that matter), and it is two words: BACK UP! There is a reason why Apple require you to create an Apple ID, and that is to allow you to sync your device’s data to iCloud, a very useful feature of iOS. Make sure this is activated on your iOS device so you don’t need to panic whenever your device malfunctions.
You may also want to try other foolproof backup methods such as printing a copy of your contacts or extracting them from your phone to a CSV or XLS file through apps such as iPhone Contacts Manager, or keeping them in other Cloud storage facilities apart from iCloud. Whatever you choose, just make sure you give some time and effort to keeping extra copies, because extra copies can never be too many when it comes to precious data!
Conclusion
iPhone is an incredible piece of technology ever made and nowadays it serve a lot of different purposes. However, since an iOS device is primarily used for calls and messages, perhaps the most important feature is the ability to store valuable contacts.
Imagine if our iPhones still didn’t have caller ID or the contacts feature, then we’d have to manually write down our contacts and keep those old address books, and what a fuss, right? But although our iOS devices can store a lot of information on our contacts now from multiple phone numbers, e-mail addresses, image contacts and even related to us, iOS devices are not invincible to threats of data hacking and loss.
If you unfortunately mistakenly delete your contacts on your iPhone, read the solutions above and recover deleted contacts along with the best one in your mind.