iPhone 7 lost all its telephone numbers

[Chris Hogg]

As title. The phone was OK a couple of days ago, but now when I touch the green phone icon bottom left on the screen, I get the list of my contacts, but none of them have their phone numbers. They used to have! While I can go through the tedious process of re-entering them all again, I'd rather just be able to drag them back from wherever they've disappeared to, and more particularly, know why they disappeared in the first place so that I can hopefully avoid it happening again. I'm new to a smart phone, and am slowly beginning to hate it more and more!

[Jim Jackson]

Just a thought...

Not iphone, but Android, but ... when my wife's phone lost some numbers my son told us to reseat the SD card inside. And sure enough they came back.

[GB]

iphone is normally backed up to the cloud - I think that's by default. Do you have icloud on your PC, or can you install it, then look at the contacts?

[Mark Carver]

When I had an iphone I transferred all my contacts from my previous Android phone by sync'ing Google Contacts to the iphone, years later and after three iphones, I went back to Android, by the same method, all seamless transfers.

[John]

Chris Hogg [e-mail] wrote

Have you tried turning the phone off and turning it on again ?

That usually fixes most of that sort of problem.

What have you done about backups ? If you have the automatic backup to the cloud enabled, a factory reset should see it restored if the power cycle doesn't fix it.

Mostly the phone gets its brain scrambled.

[Chris Hogg]

Thanks for the suggestions. After a bit of random button touching vaguely in the direction of restoring from i-cloud(!) all my numbers have magically re-appeared! I suspect finger trouble on my part in the beginning, but it doesn't improve my confidence in the damn thing!

[JNugent]

Did you back it up to the cloud?

[John]

Chris Hogg [e-mail] wrote

No, it isn't possible to lose the numbers but keep the contact names by finger trouble.

They do take a bit of getting used to.

[Chris Hogg]

TBH I really don't know!! The chap in the shop set up a number of things for me, and it's possible that automatic backup was one of them. But having discovered that everything is still there, I made a positive effort to back stuff up, so it is backed up now.

[JNugent]

Excellent.

HNY.

[Brian Gaff (Sofa]

I assume you have a recent back up on a pc or in I cloud but really it might be time to get a more modern phone, say the 2020SE? Brian

[Brian Gaff (Sofa]

A lot of people suggest if you have thick fingers you might find that using the blind facilities with fewer gestures and a talking or magnified interface rather than the ordinary one. Brian

[Jim GM4DHJ ...]

never happens with my nokia 1100 ......

[Dave Plowman (News]

Well worth getting My Phone Explorer. That can store all your data on your PC. Also a handy way of transferring pics and so on. And also for sending SMS messages using the PC keyboard. It can connect by Wi-Fi, Bluetooth or cable.

Also for things like editing your contact list - easier to do with a proper keyboard.

[Chris Hogg]

Hmm...interesting, but Googling for My Phone Explorer says it works with Sony Ericsson and Android mobile phones, but doesn't mention Apple. Is there something equivalent for iPhones, do you know?

[Adrian Caspersz]

iTunes, if you have a Windows or Mac computer to run it on.

iPhones don't really work as a portable data storage device (except for photos taken), the users are encouraged to use iTunes or cloud storage - you do have a large choice of these, iCloud works well, and yup, configure that backup!

I've had a play with my mine, my contacts list does not show numbers along side. For me it's a click to another screen to see further info.

If it's the latter that the numbers disappeared from, then.. ermmm, yeah, panic.

[Dave Plowman (News]

Ah - sorry. Thought it worked with Apple too.