My little son played my iPhone 5 and deleted several contacts by mistake, and I didn’t back them up with iTunes. Now I need them urgently, is there a way to recover data from my iPhone5 itself without iTunes backup? Please help! Thanks in advance.
Due to the special technology of iOS devices, it's not impossible to recover data directly from the iPhone itself. There is indeed such a program that enables you to recover contacts from iPhone 5S/5C/5/4S/4/3GS without iTunes backup files: iFonebox (Windows) or iFonebox (Mac).
Download the free trial version below to have a try.
Note: If you've synced your iPhone 5 with iTunes on your PC or Mac before losing your contacts, you can also recover your contacts by extracting the iTunes backup.
Recover iPhone 5 contacts without backup in 2 steps
The tutorial below is about the Windows version of iFonebox. If you are a Mac user, please read the guide for iFonebox (Mac) here: Recover iPhone contacts on Mac.
Before recovering deleted iPhone 5 contacts, you need to know that you shouldn't use your iPhone 5 for anything after you lost your contacts, because any operation on your iPhone 5 may overwrite the lost data. The best way is to power off your iPhone 5 until you get back you lost data.
Now follow the next steps to recover deleted iPhone 5 contacts without any backup files
Step 1. Connect your iPhone 5 to the computer
First of all, connect your iPhone to your computer, and then run iFonebox on PC. Here choose “Recover from iOS device”
For different iPhones, you can enter different recovery ways after you connect your iPhone. Below is the main window for all iPhones.
For iPhone 4/3GS, you can choose to go to the Advanced Mode to get a deeper scan for your iPhone. Just click on the “Advance Mode” button.
step 2. Preview & recover deleted contacts on your iPhone 5
After the scan, you can preview all data that have been found by iFonebox. Choose "Contacts" on the top and you can preview all your deleted contacts here as follow, including job titles, addresses, emails and more.
The data found here includes those contacts you have on your iPhone 5 now. If you only want to retrieve deleted contacts from your iPhone 5, check box “Only display the deleted items”. Then mark and recover them.
Further Reading
Recover deleted photos on iPhone: This article shows you how to recover deleted photos on iPhone.
