Can I extract iPhone contacts from previous iTunes backup?

MoRT489 · 1 Jul 2014 at 18:30

I was having a mare with iCloud contacts backup since my wife and I use the same Apple ID and since ios7 all our contacts are shared so I switched off iCloud contacts on my phone today and with it all my contacts bar about 10 which were actually saved to the phone's memory have gone. I tried switching iCloud contacts back on but it now only contains my wife's contacts - nice "backup" facility!

So rather than restoring from a circa 4 week old iTunes backup to retrieve my contacts, is there a way to extract contacts from an iTunes backup on the PC to an excel or word file or similar?

I did a couple of searches but couldn't find a similar thread.

MoRT489 · 8 Jul 2014 at 11:52

82 views but no one knows the answer

looks like I'm not going to be lucky.

MoRT489 · 8 Jul 2014 at 12:19

Yea, nothing particularly helpful, just some links to third party software from people with 1 post rating, so you can guess how much I wanted to click on those.

MoRT489 · 9 Jul 2014 at 11:58

Once I extract the contacts from a previous backup do either of these programs allow me to drop the file into a current backup or directly onto the phone or does it only convert into an excel-readable file that I'll need to input by hand?

MoRT489 · 9 Jul 2014 at 14:18

Yes I wanted to delete it from my device cos it became muddled with all of my wife's contacts but I had assumed it would be saved on iCloud for me to be able to get it back if necessary... apparently not.