MobileMe Sync Deleted Contacts

For those of you who don't know, MobileMe is a service from Apple that syncs your various devices with the cloud. You can sync your iPhone and computer and then access the information from a browser as well. It is a great idea in theory and for a time, until we sold the company, I was also using it to back up my QuickBooks files automatically.

But we sold the company and I decided to let my MobileMe subscription run out in February. I am a longer user of Gmail and Google's services like Google Docs, so it didn't seem to make sense to pay $99 for a service I can get for free elsewhere. No problem, as I already had all my contacts on my phone and computer. I just lost the ability to sync them with the cloud. Since my phone is with me everywhere I saw no issue with this.

However, last week, the opportunity arose for me to reactivate my MobileMe with a family member who was getting the family plan. So I accepted, nothing is better than free, right? My old account still existed, I just couldn't access it. It was reactivated and all seemed to be fine.

Then come Monday, mid-way through the day, suddenly all contacts disappeared from my iPhone. And since my computer was also set up with the MobileMe account information, it also wiped them out completely. Yay! Oh for joy, now I get to re-enter 500+ contacts.

If anyone has any ideas on an easier recovery than trying to import from spreadsheets and check each one by hand, let me know! I would be happy to try anything at this point.

Comments

Anonymous said…
Hey not trying to preach here, but...Backups backups backups!!! You must perform daily backups to avoid this kind of scenario. It is penny wise and dollar foolish to trust any cloud with your precious data. I have around 650 contacts I spend time keeping current, bookmarks, calendars, and mail, and I use Time Machine on Leopard to perform daily backups...and also perform a address book archive and store one on my Mac, one on another external drive connected to my router, and store another one on my iDisk. Takes only seconds and a script does it all. The cloud has been behaving for months for me, but given MobileMe's history, I don't trust it 100%.

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