Recovering your contacts in iOS 7

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That entry that says ‘iCloud’ – you’re going to need that

Apple hasn’t shipped iOS 7 to the world yet, but, I’ve already found a rather interesting bug in the gold master (the final version of iOS 7 that get shipped to everyone).   And it’s one of those that might make you freak out just a tad…

I’m not sure what triggered it – I had already been using iOS 7 for two days quite successfully, and mostly enjoying it.  Then, mysteriously, I looked down after my wife had texted me, and it showed her phone number, not her name.  Well, that’s not good.  It had been right before, but suddenly there were no contacts for anyone.  Definitely not good – while it’s a great device for playing games, working, etc., it’s primary use is still a phone!

There’s two ways to loose your contacts with iOS 7 – I know what the first one is, and it’s pretty simple to cause if you are in a hurry.  When you update to iOS 7, be sure that during set up you fill out the iCloud stuff – if you don’t, you might not have any contacts, as it’s going to sync with your iCloud account.  If it can’t get to the account, well, you might not have contacts.

The second one I haven’t figured out yet:  my iCloud account was in there and synced up, so that wasn’t a problem.  And, it had been working – I’m not sure WHY it quit working.  Bummer.

Fortunately, the fix for either of these situations is pretty simple

1) Go into Settings on your phone

2) Select iCloud – about half way through the various options

3) Make sure your iCloud account information is filled out

4) Turn on the appropriate switches, particularly the Contacts switch.

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The Account information needs to be filled out, and the Contacts switch should be turned on

Once you’ve got that all turned on, go back into your contacts.  In the upper left hand corner of the Contacts app you’ll see a refresh button.  Hit it, and wait a moment – there’s no activity indicator (bad Apple, always use activity indicators), so you might think it’s not doing anything.  Have just a little patience, then suddenly all your contacts will appear again 🙂  Problem fixed 🙂

 

1 thought on “Recovering your contacts in iOS 7”

  1. Actually, there are three ways to recover lost contacts of iPhone, one is from the iTunes backup files, another one is recover them directly from the iPhone with the help of iPhone Data Recovery software, the last one is to restore contacts from iCloud, since you are wondering about the way without the using of iTunes backup, you can choose a kind of iPhone Data Recovery software to recover your contacts in a few steps and it is very easy and fast, you can have a try!

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