It seems that no one can remember more than a couple of phone numbers (at best) these days. I don’t remember any, and can you even remember your closest family member’s phone number at this point? Probably not. That’s when you starting thinking about the iPhone contacts feature being a godsend. Despite the tech, however, there can be times – like installingiOS 18 beta– when your contacts go missing or get deleted. Fortunately, there are a few ways to recover your old contacts via your iPhone and other devices. We’ll guide you through each technique so you can get back to functioning as normal quickly.
Difficulty
What You Need
Your iPhone
An iCloud account
Luckily, iCloud makes it easy to restore your contacts on thebest iPhones. Here’s how to restore contacts on an iPhone from iCloud using iOS.
To avoid losing your data and contacts, check out our guides onhow to backup an iPhoneandhow to use iCloud.
Recover contacts using iCloud on your iPhone
If you’ve lost or deleted a contact by mistake, don’t panic. We have a fix. Your contacts are set to sync with iCloud by default, so you can go toSettingsand turn them off and on to sync to your iPhone again.
Step 1:Go toSettings > [Your name] > iCloud.
Step 2:TurnContactsoff and selectKeep on my iPhone.
Step 3:TurnContactson and selectMerge. Wait a little while, and you should see the deleted contacts back on your iPhone.
Recover contacts using iCloud.com
This is another trusted method for retrieving lost contact information — as well as other things like Reminders and Calendar events — and it comesdirectly from Apple. All you need is a computer, your Apple ID and password, and a bit of time.
Step 1:Pull upiCloud.comand use your Apple ID and password to log in.
Step 2:When you’ve signed in, go down and select theData recoverybutton.
Step 3:Go down to theRestore contacts.
Step 4:You’ll find a list of archives you’ve created in the past. Using their dates, locate an archive that should contain your full contacts list and hitRestore.
Step 5:HitRestoreonce more to confirm and start the restoration. Afterward, you’ll get an email at the address linked to your Apple ID.
More techniques for restoring iPhone contacts
Here are some more things you can try:
What about new contacts?
Most of the above techniques will update and replace all of your contacts on any iPhone, rather than merely adding any that are missing. So, assuming you’ve added new contacts since the last backup, you will lose those new contacts. The good news is that your iPhone will automatically backup your new contacts before it completes this restore, so you will be able to retrieve them later.
you’re able to retrieve your new contacts by following the first three steps above. When you do, make sure you select the archive made on the same day you restored your phone. Of course, if you accidentally restore with the wrong archive, no worries. You can use the same process if you accidentally select an incorrect archive to restore your contacts.
