Have had an iPhone for a very long time. Last Apple computer I had was before the iPhone was a thing. Got myself a MacBook the other day and started setting it up last night.
Linked it to our iCloud account and then it asked me if I wanted to use messages/FaceTime from the device I verified my iCloud account with so I said yes.
About a minute later a message popped up on my screen from a phone number as the contact. But I recognized the text as an answer to a text I sent on my phone to a buddy. Thought it was weird there was no contact name or the little avatar thing. But just figured it was loading my contact info or something and I kept fiddling with my MacBook.
Later in the evening I grabbed my phone and opened up my messages and most of my messages did not have contact info. So did and some did not.
I searched some names of my contacts on both the MacBook and Phone and it returned NOTHING!!!!!!

Went to the Genius Bar today and explained the situation and they have no clue why a ton of my contacts were deleted nor could they get them back.
I was there for well over an hour and they had 3 different people looking at both the MacBook and Phone.
None of them had a clue.

Luckily I don't delete my text messages so I am going back through the conversations to figure out who is who and creating new contact cards.
So pissed. I am down to the bottom and can't figure out who the folks are. I have figured out a bunch but I am sure I have a ton of contacts that are just gone as we never texted.

So I made sure to have the guy show me how to save the contacts to a flash drive. Guess I will be adding a monthly backup of my contacts now.

That sucks!

I now have a relatively new Mac laptop bought on the forum. I backed up my old laptop onto a hard drive and talked with Apple and they walked me through the entire process of transferring the data. Everything synced fine and with my phone.

But I was very concerned because this stuff scares the shit out of me.

For your phone you can buy some iCloud storage for a minimal charge, >$5 a month, and back up your phone automatically every night. This has saved me more than once.

quote:

Originally posted by Dzozer:
For your phone you can buy some iCloud storage for a minimal charge, >$5 a month, and back up your phone automatically every night. This has saved me more than once.

I have this and use this. It seems somehow it got corrupted as the backup did not have all the contacts either as it was backed up after the issue happened.

I had a similar issue a long while back…hard to remember but it was how I stored the contacts.

I had business contacts and personal/private contacts. They mingled in the cloud but they downloaded to different devices based on a selection.

Not sure if this is the same but it might be.

I lost some contacts when I transferred from my old phone to my current one. I even had to correct some that were out of alphabetical order. I called Apple support, and they couldn't help me. Since then, I have written down all my contacts in a notebook just in case it happens again.

Can you go out to iCloud.com, on Safari, and see your contacts?

If you can, they’re not lost.
Try turning off contact sync in your settings, and turning it back on. You might have to do it to both devices.

^^^^^^^^^
We tried that in the Apple Store and no luck

I guessed you might have tried that, but I thought I’d throw it out there.

I have Contacts app on my iPhone but it’s synced to my Google contacts.