iPhone Deleted Your Contacts? Here’s How to Get All Your Phone Numbers Back

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It's 2016, so you have to save your precious brain space for the important stuff — like your lock screen passcode, your Wi-Fi password and your Netflix password. You sure as hell don't have time to memorize 10 digits every time you shoot your friend a casual "what's up?" text or a random "u up?" 

So if you find your iPhone has deleted all of your contacts, you're in trouble. Unless you backed them up. (Back that shit up.

Here's how to recover your contacts if your iPhone deletes them. 

An Apple Support member said in a phone call that "a majority" of people who call Apple Support have backed up their contacts in the iCloud. To back up your contacts in iCloud, you must be signed into your Apple account on your device and select contacts as a category to save to the iCloud within your phone settings. 

If you have backed up your contacts, you'll first want to go into settings. You'll then go to the iCloud category. If you see that it's grey, switch it to green. Voila. 

Mic

If your contacts disappear, go to that page. If the contacts switch is already green, you're going to need to turn it off and then turn it right back on, the Apple Support team member said. Your contacts may not appear right away, she said — sometimes you'll have to double tap the home button and close out all of the open apps and then go back into your contacts. Powering the phone off and on should also do the trick. 

You can also recover your contacts if you backed them up to iTunes. To do that, you'll need to plug your phone into your computer, launch the iTunes application, select your iPhone from the left menu, click 'info' and then check the 'sync contacts' option.

I asked Apple Support if there is any way to recover your sweet contacts if you didn't back them up. To which she responded, "no." 

But hey — most of the apps you're probably using have a chat option anyway that doesn't necessitate a phone number but rather someone's user name or Facebook account — like Messenger, WhatsApp, Instagram, Snapchat and even Twitter. RIP phone numbers.

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