Can I extract iPhone contacts from previous iTunes backup?

MoRT489

MoRT489

MoRT489

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Joined
21 Aug 2006
Posts
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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.
 
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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.
 
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?
 
This is what you should have done...

Created 2 iCloud accounts (1 each) then signed in to the iTunes store with 1 account. This way, you're keeping contacts/calendars/notes separate, but syncing purchasing etc.

Anyway.. usually when you turn iCloud off/on it asks if you want to save or delete the data on your device.. I'm guessing you chose to delete? :p
 
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.
 
You're lucky you didn't delete all of your wife's contacts by turning on iCloud again after deleting your device data.

Lesson learnt though: if you want to keep contacts separate, either create "groups" in the contacts and filter them on the device, or sync your own.

I did the same once by mistake way back when it was .Mac, I know that sucky feeling! Why don't you just restore from your 4 week backup?
 
In fact, there are two ways for you to recover your deleted contacts from iPhone. First, you can use a RecoveryTool third-party tool to directly scan and recover contacts from your iPhone. Second, if you've synced your iPhone with iTunes, you also can regain your deleted contacts by iphone backup extractor.
 
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