How to Recover Deleted or Lost Contacts from iTunes

I have many contacts on my iPhone for business use. But I accidentally deleted some of them, and updated the newest iCloud backup. Now I know I cannot recover contacts from iCloud backup. But I made iTunes backup before, can I restore iPhone contacts from iTunes? Can I restore iPhone contacts only, not other data like messages, photos, music, etc.

In daily life, you may also meet the problem mentioned as above. Deleting important contacts accidentally or losing contacts for a sudden attack on iPhone like a drowning iPhone, or failure of upgrade are very common. So recovering contacts on iPhone becomes urgent for you. iCloud and iTunes backup are coming in handy. However, if you forget to make iPhone backup with iCloud, or the newest iCloud backup does not contain the contacts you want, and what is worse, your iPhone is lost or damaged, then you will find it is in vain to retrieve contacts from iCloud. At this point, you will know iTunes will be your sincere friend for help you to restore contacts from backup. This post focuses on this issue exactly. In the following description, you will get two ways to restore contacts on iPhone from iTunes backup file.

• Restore contacts from iTunes backup free
• Restore contacts from iTunes without iPhone

Recover deleted contacts from iTunes backup free

iTunes is a free backup tool that enables you to back up iPhone contacts. Definitely, you could also get contacts back on iPhone from iTunes backup file. Before you decide to use this method to retrieve contacts from iTunes, you need to pay attention to the following points:

Follow the steps as below to recover deleted contacts on iPhone from iTunes for free.

Step 1Download the latest iTunes on your computer or Mac, install and launch it.

Step 2Plug your iPhone to PC/Mac with USB cable, and wait seconds, you will see your iPhone icon appear on iTunes. Click it to view all your iPhone data categories on iTunes. And all iPhone information including backup and restore will show on the right side.

Step 3Click the "Restore Backup" option under "Manually Back Up and Restore" to restore your contacts.

Restore contacts from iTunes without iPhone

If your iPhone is unfortunate to be damaged or crashed, and you get no iPhone in hand, then you could use an iTunes Contact Extractor to help you to view and restore contacts from iTunes backup.

Take the following guide to try to restore deleted iPhone contacts.

Step 1Scan iTunes backup

After downloading this app, install and launch it on your PC or Mac. Choose the third recovery mode, "Recover from iTunes Backup File", choose the exact backup with your wanted iPhone contacts, click "Start Scan" to scan iPhone backup on this computer via iTunes.

Step 2 View deleted contacts

It will take this program seconds to scan your iTunes backup. After that, all iPhone backup will be displayed in the interface. Click "Contacts" on the left to view its detailed contacts information (contact name, phone number, Email, home page, etc.) on the right window. The red marked are the deleted contacts, and black are existing contacts on iPhone now.

Step 3Restore iPhone contacts

After checking the deleted contacts, you can checkmark the contacts that you want to retrieve, choose single or multiple contacts, click the "Recover" button on the right bottom to restore and save your deleted contacts to your PC or Mac.

This contact extractor is strong enough to let you to do the following things:

• It lets you view and select data category to restore from iTunes backup on your iPhone/iPad/iPod. Not only contacts, you could also find deleted notes, messages, photos from iOS device easily, so that you could print text messages from iPhone easily.
• Whether your iPhone is broken or failing of updating or jailbreaking, you will be able to use this software to recover lost contacts after jailbreaking without iPhone.
• The restored contacts will be saved on your computer in HTML file, and you are capable of reading them on your Firefox or Google Chrome browser directly.
• If you need, it will help you to recover deleted contacts form your iPhone directly, iTune backup and iCloud backup.
• You need to make sure that you download this app to your computer or Mac where you make iPhone contacts backup with iTunes.

The above two methods are also available to help you restore deleted contacts from iTunes, but they get some difference. See the following chart to get a comparison and find the better way by yourself.

How to restore deleted contacts from iTunes backup
	Pros	Cons
iTunes	1. It is free.	1. It needs your original iPhone. 2. The restored data will remove the existing data on iPhone.
iTunes Contacts Extractor	1. It will recover data without iPhone. 2. It allows you only recover contacts. 3. It will keep both your restored and existing contacts.	1. Its free version only allows you to scan and preview the deleted contacts, and Pro version lets you restore contacts from iTunes backup.

In this post, we mainly show you how to recover deleted contacts from iTunes backup files with the help of iTunes Contact Extractor. Any suggestion is welcome.