Getting contacts from Microsoft Exchange on my iPhone

Question

I recently brought an Android phone and I'm trying to move my contact list from my iPhone to the new phone. Someone suggested using Exchange so I added Exchange to my iPhone using my Gmail details and selected Mail, Contacts, and Calendars.

It asked if I wanted to delete contacts from my iPhone and I said yes thinking my contacts were backed up with iTunes. Now I have lost my contacts from my iPhone and I don't know how to get them from Exchange. I have also tried selecting Sync contacts with Google in iTunes but this does't seems to have done anything. What should I do?

Answer 1

Although your phone and your exchange are now in sync, you did not merge both databases. By 'deleting' you relpaced your phones contacts with those of the Google Exchange Server.

Your contacts are backed up inside the general backup of your phone and if you restore your iPhone from those backups you get your contacts back, though loosing everything new since then. You can extract the contacts directly from the backup with tools like iPhone BackupExtractor. You should be able to import those directly via the gmail webinterface.

Answer 2

You should not have clicked Delete contact rather Merge contacts. You might want to reside to other more straight forward ways to transfer and sync iPhone contacts.

To get your original iPhone contacts back: If you recently synced your iPhone with iTunes, the contact entries were backed up automatically by iTunes. The only way to restore them is if you restore your iPhone to factory settings via iTunes. iTunes will then ask you whether you wish to restore your iPhone from an earlier backup. Choose the latest entry. Your contact entries will be restored.