I recently upgraded my mother's iPhone 11 Pro to iOS 26.2, but unfortunately, it seems to have wiped all her contacts. I noticed that there was an iCloud backup created just a day before the update. I'm considering wiping the phone and restoring it from that backup. I have a few questions about the process:
1. Is it possible to restore from a backup that isn't the most recent one? There's a more recent backup that was made today, but it won't help since her contacts were lost before that.
2. If the restoration doesn't work, can we just revert to the latest backup without losing anything?
3. The backup I want to restore is from before the iOS upgrade. Will there be any issues restoring it if it's an older iOS version?
Any advice would be greatly appreciated! It's really frustrating to see decades of contacts vanish so suddenly, especially since iCloud isn't showing any options for recovery despite being synced.
2 Answers
Restoring from an older backup is definitely possible! Just keep in mind a couple of things:
1. An Apple Senior Advisor might need to submit a ticket to prevent newer backups from overwriting the older one you want.
2. If your mother's contacts were synced with iCloud, restoring from a backup won't bring them back, as cloud-synced data isn't included in iCloud backups. If you have an offline backup on a Mac or PC, you might be in luck—just check it with a program like iMazing to see if the contacts are there.
3. You can restore to an earlier iOS version without issues, but not the other way around, so that's fine.
And just a tip: remember that personal data management is a shared responsibility, so it's important to back things up regularly!
It's worth checking if her iCloud storage was full, but if it wasn't, here's a heads-up: data that syncs with iCloud (like contacts) isn't included in iCloud backups. So, restoring from the backup may not help for those missing contacts.
Consider checking if she was syncing her contacts with another service like Gmail or Exchange. Logging into those accounts online can sometimes show contacts that aren't visible on the phone. Maybe she just needs to reconnect those accounts!
Thanks for the tip! I checked her iCloud storage, and it wasn’t full. She primarily uses iCloud and Gmail, but I’ll definitely make sure those accounts are linked properly to see if any contacts come back.
Good luck with the restore! I hope you can get those contacts back; it's so frustrating when things like this happen!