Contacts are an extremely important component of any smartphone or device, helping you keep in touch with all of your friends, family members and colleagues. However, we often come across cases where people forget to back up their contacts and lose them all in case of a data loss or accidental reset. Luckily, with iOS, all your contacts are backed up to iCloud, and you can easily restore them to your devices.
Previously, restoring contacts involved connecting your device to a PC or Mac running iTunes and restoring it using a iTunes backup. This would usually be a hit-or-miss method. Now, iCloud backups have become the norm, and if you’re an iPhone / iPad / Mac user, your device may have automatically backed up your contacts to the iCloud.
Also read: What You Need to Know About Apple iCloud
How to Check Whether Your Contacts Were Backed Up on iCloud
The first step to restoring your contacts is to check whether they were actually backed up to iCloud or not. To do this:
1. Open any web browser and navigate to iCloud.com. Enter your Apple ID credentials, and click on the arrow to log in.
2. Click on Contacts.
3. Here, if you see a list of all the contacts that you had on your iOS device, you’re in luck, as your contacts were backed up automatically to iCloud and can be restored to your device.
Also read: How to Add a Contact to the Home Screen on Android and iPhone
How to Restore Your Contacts
Follow the steps below to restore your contacts to your device:
1. Open the iCloud home page.
2. Click on Account Settings.
3. Here, click on “Restore Contacts,” which is under the Advanced section at the bottom of the page. This will open a new pop-up menu.
4. You’ll see multiple archives of your contacts list backed up to iCloud. You can choose which date/version of the backup to restore to your device.
5. Once you restore your contacts from iCloud, all existing contacts on your device will automatically be deleted. Thus, you’ll get a warning to confirm the restoration process. Simply click on “Restore,” and the process should automatically complete in a few minutes.
6. Once the restoration process is done, iCloud will automatically make a new backup of the archive. Click on Done to exit.
That’s all there is to it. This method will restore lost contacts to all devices that are using iCloud, which means every device you have your iCloud account synced to will be restored with the Contacts backup. This convenience of iCloud allows you to restore contacts across all of your devices within a few minutes.
Good to know: Should your iOS contact names go missing or show as numbers, that’s fixable.
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