Confessedly, the most important thing on a mobile phone is your contacts. Without contacts, you phone cannot be called as a phone. We count on so much on the contacts that without them we will be least informed and cut off from almost all our family, friends, customers and etc. We cannot afford losing them. Fortunately, there are quote a lot of ways to retrieve your lost contacts and I would like to share some with you.
Restore Contacts from iTunes
If you have synced your iPhone with iTunes, actually, if you enabled the automatic syncing, you should have one iTunes backup file. Since iTunes backup file is not a readable file and does not allow you to recover the contacts selectively. You need to restore your iPhone with your entire backup file.
Step 1: Plug in your device to your computer using the cable that came with it.
Step 2: Select your iPhone, iPad, or iPod after it is detected by iTunes.
Step 3: In the Summary panel, click Restore.
Step 4: Click Restore again to confirm that you want to restore your device to factory settings and delete all data and content.
Step 5: After your device is restored to factory settings, it will restart. When it does, you’ll see the "Slide to set up” welcome screen.
Follow the steps in the device Setup Assistant. You can set up your device as new or use a previous backup.
Note: Never try to use your iPhone, iPad or iPod or sync your device to iTunes the moment you realize the data loss. Otherwise, either the newly generated data or the previous synced data will be overwritten and erased permanently.
Restore Contacts from iCloud
Things will become much easier, if you have backed up your contacts through iCloud. You can re-download your contacts to your iPhone or iPad from iCloud through just a few taps.
Step 1: Go to Settings on your iPhone or iPad and Switch on iCloud.
Step 3:Tap On Contacts — if it's already on, turn it off and then back on again to trigger a re-download. When asked what to do with existing contacts, choose the Delete option.
Step 4: If you are asked, choose to Merge contacts.
Step 5: Launch the Contacts app or the Phone app and verify your contacts are all there.
Sync Gmail contacts to iPhone/iPad
If you have switched from Android Phone to iPhone, you can choose to sync your Gmail contacts to your iPhone or iPad.
Step 1: Tap Settings > Mail, Contacts, Calendars > Add Account > Other > Add CardDav Account.
Step 2: Enter the following information in the fields:
Server: google.com
User Name: Enter your full Google email address
Password: Your Google account password
Step 3: Select Next at the top of the screen to complete the setup.
After you have completed the setup, open the Contacts app on your device. Syncing should begin automatically.
Retrieve contacts with third party software
There are dozens of third party software particularly capable of recovering single data category like contacts from iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch as well as from iTunes/iCloud backup file selectively without worry about data overlapping and irretrievable erasing.
Here in this post, I would like to take iFonebox, one of the iOS data recovery software for demonstration.
Actually, developers would always offer trial version for you to download and have a try. And there are both Windows and Mac version, so that you can choose the right version according to what kind of computer you are using.
Step 1: Install and launch iFonebox and choose a recovery mode. If your device still works properly, you can simply choose to recover your contacts directly from iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch.
Step 2: Choose the data category of Contacts by clicking on the icon of Contacts to trigger the Contacts scanning and analyzing.
Step 3: Preview the extracted Contacts items and choose whatever you need to recover to your computer or iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch.
Source: Use iTunes to restore your iPhone, iPad, or iPod; Restore contacts from iCloud
