IOS – How to restore iPhone contacts lost after an app crash

contactsdata-recoveryiosiphoneitunes

After a crash/reboot I lost all contacts on my iPhone.

I have an iTunes backup, but it is several months old. The iPhone was set to sync with my Windows Contacts list, but it also appears to not have been modified for several months. iCloud wasn't ever enabled.

How can I get (most of) my contacts back onto my phone?

A normal iTunes restores all data types at once, which means loosing all non-contacts data I added since the last backup.

I tried an iPhone recovery tool without any success already (Wondershare Dr.Fone; it has many clones, published across several pseudo-"how-to" sites: Asoftech iPhone Data Recovery; Recovery-Android: "Restore iPhone from Backup" and "Restore iPhone from Backup"; iPhone-iPad Recovery). The tool found no contacts at all, although correctly displayed deleted items of all other types available on iPhone.

Is it possible to either pull contacts only from iTunes backup file and restore those, or just sync my existing (although possibly out of date) contacts from Windows? Are there other tools which have chances to recover directly from iPhone storage, even if Dr.Fone failed? Any other ideas?

Best Answer

I found how to make iTunes restore only contacts, while preserving the rest intact:

  1. run iTunes before connecting iPhone
  2. disable auto-syncing in preferences: Edit > Preferences > Devices > Prevent iPods, iPhones, and iPads from syncing automatically should be switched On
  3. connect iPhone to PC. In iTunes:
  4. on the Sidebar, select your iPhone (press Ctrl-S if Sidebar is hidden)
  5. on the top central menu (Summary | Info | Apps | Music | ...), click Info
  6. scroll the page to bottom, there's Advanced section
  7. switch on: Replace information on this phone > Contacts
  8. click Apply in the bottom right of iTunes window (or right click on iPhone and choose Sync)

These steps wipe the local contact store on iPhone (leaving cloud contact sync alone, if applicable) and injects all the contacts stored in the PC-side data source that iTunes has selected (from Windows Contacts in my case; Outlook on Windows / Contacts on Mac in other setups) and pushes those contacts to the device. It does not load contacts from an iOS backup.

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