How to Recover Deleted Contacts from iOS, Android and SIM
For regular smartphone users, there really is nothing worse than losing contact details for family, friends, and acquaintances – not to mention work contacts. After all, a contacts book is the culmination of years of socializing and relationships, allowing you to stay in touch with the ones you love and the ones you work with.
Fortunately, if you want to restore contacts to your personal or work device, you’ve come to the right place. In our contact recovery section, we’ll show you how to recover deleted contacts for iOS and Android devices and how to restore contacts from SIM cards too.
If you have accidentally deleted the contacts stored on your iPhone, all hope isn’t lost. There are several ways to recover deleted contacts on an iPhone.
The most common recovery method is through a user’s iCloud account. iPhone owners are recommended to make regular backups of their contacts and store them within their iCloud account, so they’re ready for this eventuality. Aside from backing up to iCloud accounts, there are two alternative solutions you can choose to keep your contacts accessible to you:
Most iPhone users will have been prompted at some stage to create an iCloud account. Of course, the main issue with backing up your contacts to an iCloud account is that it backs up your entire iPhone. Furthermore, when the time comes to restore your contacts onto an iPhone device, you’ll have to restore the phone to its factory settings, losing all of your apps and communications. The only way to avoid having to revert to factory settings is to create a separate backup of all your iPhone data, so although the process might be the most common, it’s by no means the most convenient.
iPhone users can also make a backup of their iPhone contacts to an iTunes account. The limitations of an iTunes backup are that, unlike the iCloud method, the backup must be stored on the hard drive of a Mac or PC where you also have iTunes installed, taking up considerable space on your desktop or laptop instead of the cloud. However, just like with an iCloud backup, if you restore contacts from iTunes you’ll have to be prepared to fully overwrite the existing data stored on your iPhone.
Of course, there are several third-party apps designed solely with the idea of backing up and restoring contact books in the event you lose your contacts by accident. We’ve reviewed several of them in our full guide on how to recover deleted contacts on iPhone devices.
If you’re an iPhone owner, click here to find out the best ways to restore contacts on iOS.
Just like iPhones, arguably the most valuable thing stored on an Android device is your own data, including your contact book. It’s your key to unlocking conversations with family, friends, and associates, wherever you are in the world.
Unfortunately, there are times when contacts can be lost unwittingly on all types of Android smartphones. Fortunately, thanks to Android’s relationship with Google, and the freedom of Android app developers to create third-party contact recovery apps, there are several ways to recover deleted contacts on Android.
Gmail is one of the last places some Android users would ordinarily think to look to for restoring lost contacts. Nevertheless, Gmail does have an in-built feature to restore lost contact details – providing you have a Gmail account, of course. It all revolves around syncing your contacts book from your Android phone to Google’s online services. Once synced, it’s possible to restore your contacts to any state within the past 30 days.
Those Android users who haven’t synchronized their contacts with a Gmail account needn’t tear their hair out either. There are plenty of third-party apps out there, many of which we’ve reviewed on this website, that can pull out your contacts data as a backup, ready to be restored from the cloud whenever you lose your contacts.
If you want to know more about restoring contacts on Android devices, click here for more comprehensive guidance and support.
If you are a smartphone user who prefers to save their contacts to your device’s SIM card, we’ve also got you covered in the event you lose your contacts.
Contacts can be lost from a SIM card in many ways. You might accidentally delete the contact book with a single incorrect tap of the screen. You may fall foul of a virus that attacks your smartphone’s operating system and wipes your device data. You may, of course, suffer physical damage to the phone or bend the SIM card badly while inserting or removing it. In addition, some smartphone users may misplace their PUK numbers, which are used to unblock SIM cards and gain access to contacts already stored on the SIM card.
Fortunately, there are a number of options for those looking to recover deleted SIM contacts on Android and iOS devices. There are third-party applications – some of which we’ve reviewed in our comprehensive SIM contact recovery guide – that can help you to retrieve deleted contacts from SIM memory.
If you want to know more about restoring SIM contacts, click here for a variety of solutions that could help you.
