what you need is…making a good backup before you try al kind of crazy stuff

my guess is that, if you didn’t sync them, didn’t store them on mobileme, you’re out of luck

but they were on the phone! shouldnt itunes back up the contacts that were on the phone!?!? why WOULDNT it!?!?

are you on mac or windowns ? on a mac it should sync with the adress book application as far as i know, or maybe you should enable that, not sure, don’t own an iphone

windows. yea i already lost all my contacts once and it took forever to get even SOME of them back. this sucks!! why would apple FORCE you to sync them?? and whats worse is, even if you put them in your phone, and then sync your phone, THE PHONE SYNCS TO THE COMPUTER, so your contacts ONLY on the phone will be deleted…THATs why i didnt sync it to the computer. so they want you to get a number, write it down, come home, put it in your computer, THEN sync it?!?!?!? i dont get it!

What they really want is for you to get a Mac, or, failing that, to buy a subscription to Mobile Me. Failing that, if you want to protect your data, you need to make more copies of it, and the way that’s usually done is by synching it.

I think your contacts will be restored when you restore your backup. It’s probably a good idea, before you try any more hacking, to make certain you have a good reliable backup of your important data. You should consider syncing your contacts with your computer not because you need them on your computer but so that if something bad happens to your iPhone, you won’t lose important information.

(My own contacts are synched to two computers besides my iPhone.)

@cwilbur – but how do i sync the contacts FROM my phone TO the computer??? last time i tried that, it synced from my COMPUTER (nothing) to my PHONE!! and i lost everything. so i dont know how to sync!!

it only gives me ONE option to sync to my pc (for contacts) and all that does, is take whats on the computer and put it on the phone. so anything on the phone thats not on the computer is lost! how stupid is that!?!?

I don’t know how to sync the contacts from the phone to the computer; for me, it does the right thing. You might do well to calm down and call Apple support, since they’ll know how to sync in the other direction.

@cwilbur – are you saying that by default, your iphone didnt sync to the contacts on your computer, but the other way around? it took the contacts from your phone and PUT them on your computer? if so, i WANT that! lol

typical apple cleverness

Apple doesn’t force you to sync your phone. And they definitely didn’t force you to attempt to Jailbreak it, so you really have no reason to be mad at them when you’re the one that tried to jailbreak the phone, knowing there are risks.

I’ve never synced an iPhone on Windows but on the Mac it intelligently syncs so that if your phone has contacts your computer doesn’t, it puts them on the computer, and vice versa.

If you told it not to sync your contacts, and then chose to jailbreak it, and then reformatted it, you really have no one to be mad at but yourself. :-/

@futurelaker88: when I plugged my iPhone in for the first time, it synced my contacts from my computer to my phone. After that, whenever I changed a contact either on my phone or on my computer, the change was synced.

Also, the first time I plugged my iPhone into my new MacBook Pro, it tried to sync things, realized that there were no contacts on the computer and a lot on the phone, and put up a dialog box warning me about this and asking me if I really wanted to sync all the contacts from my phone to my computer. I said yes.

@StellarAirman – well it worked. im jailbroke and have all my contacts. so im good