How to Recover Deleted or Lost Contacts from iPhone

Accidentally delete a group of contacts from your iPhone; system crashed wipes off all contacts from your iPhone; or even break your iPhone? Well, it does not mean that your contacts are gone for good. This article will offer you three main ways to recover lost iPhone contacts. One is retrieving contacts from iPhone directly. The other one is restoring iPhone contacts from iTunes backup. Plus, it's avaliable to recover your iPhone lost contacts from iCloud. Learn details.

First of all, download and install the best iPhone Data Recovery tool - Brorsoft iRefone for Mac

Overall, it is a professional iOS data recovery tool for iPhone/iPad/iPod users to recover lost & deleted contacts as well as notes, messages, whatsapp, photos, etc on Mac OS X (Yosmite and Mavericks included). If you accidentally deleted contacts from iPhone, just leave all the mass to the best iPhone deleted contacts recovery tool and it will offer you basically 2 methods like recover contacts directly from iPhone without backup or restore contacts from iTunes backup. If you want to get back deleted contacts from iPhone on Windows(Windows 8/8.1/10), please turn to Brorsoft iRefone.

Note: When lost your iPhone contacts, don't be depressed. But keep in mind, the sooner the better result you'll get. Otherwise, you'll never see these deleted contacts again.

Method I: Directly Scan and Restore Contacts on iPhone
Method II: Recover iPhone Contacts by extracted iTunes Backup
Method III: Download and Recover Contacts from iCloud Backup Files

Method I: Directly Scan and Restore Contacts on iPhone

Note: As long as you didn't lose your iPhone, you can use this way to recover your contacts easily.

Step 1. Connect iPhone to your Mac

Connect your iPhone to computer and run the iPhone Contacts Recovery program on your computer. Then you will see the interface as follows, click "Start" to access the data in device.

Tip: If you use an iPhone 4/3GS, iPad 1 or iPod Touch 4, you can also start the scanning of your device by clicking on the "Advanced Mode" button.

Step 2. Start to scan your iPhone

Click "Recover from iOS Device", and this iPhone data recovery software will scan your iPhone automatically ,after scanning finished, all the files include contacts, messages, call history, calendar , notes, Safari Bookmark stored on you iPhone will displayed in the windows. Just click on the "Contacts" icon, and the software will automatically start to analyze and scan it.

Step 3. Preview the contacts and selectively to recover

To recover the contacts, check the box in front of the Contacts and click the "Recover to Mac" or "Recover to Device" button, then you are successfully save the content on your computer or directly restore on your iPhone.

Method II: Recover iPhone Contacts by extracted iTunes Backup

Note: To prevent the backup file from being updated and replaced by the contacts on your iPhone now, please do not connect or sync your iPhone on iTunes after you lost your contacts.

Step 1. Scan the backup file

Choose "Recover from iTunes Backup" on the main interface. All the iTunes backup files of your iOS Device which has ever synced with iTunes on this Mac will be automatically found and listed here. You can choose the one you want and click "Select" to access the data interface.

Step 2. Preview the data in iTunes Backup

Enter into the interface to show you all the data categories in your backup. Select the Contacts to preview. The scanning time depends on the database in your iTunes Backup.

Step 3. Restore your contacts from iPhone

To recover the contacts, check the box in front of the Contacts and click the "Recover to Mac" or "Recover to Device" button, then you are successfully save the content on your computer or directly restore on your iPhone.

Tip: Form the scan result, you can see those existing in the backup file and those deleted from your iPhone showed in different colors. You can separate them by clicking "Only display the deleted items".

Method III: Download and Recover Contacts from iCloud Backup Files

Recovering contacts from iCloud is very easy if you backed up your iPhone to iCloud at least once or twice. It's recommended that you backup contacts as often as possible, especially if you tend to add lots of contacts on a regular basis.

Step 1. Sign in iCloud

Run iRefone and choose "Recover from iCloud Backup" as the recovery mode. Then you'll see the window below. Enter your iCloud account and password to login.

Step 2. Download and scan your iCloud backup

When you logged into iCloud, the program can find all iCloud backup files in your account. Choose the one where you're going to recover data and click on the "Download" button.

In the pop-up window, you can choose the type of files Contacts you would like to download. This will reduce the time of downloading the iCloud backup file. After that, you can scan the iCloud content now. Click on the "Next" button to begin. It will take you some time. Just wait for a moment.

Step 3. Start recover Contacts from iCloud Backup

The scan will be complete in a few minutes. Once it stops, you can either choose "Recover to Mac" or "Recover to Device" for transferring these recovered Contacts to your Macor directly back to your device.

This is the whole process to restore contacts selectively from iPhone direclty, iTunes backup or iCloud.