How to Restore Contacts from iCloud on PC/Mac

“I was trying to clear my personal data from my Macbook Pro to give it to my son. I manually deleted all of my contacts and then I guess the Cloud deleted them from ALL my devices. iMac, iPhone, iPad, iPods. Any way of restoring them.”

Just like the Apple user reported, you are particularly in need of restoring contacts from iCloud, when you clear contacts on your iDevice by accident or just get a new iPhone. In this post, there are 3 methods to get contacts from iCloud.

• Method 1. Sync all contacts to your iPhone iPad via iCloud freely
• Method 2. Get contacts and more by restoring from iCloud
• Method 3. Selectively restore contacts from iCloud backup with a handy tool

Solution 1. Free way to restore contacts from iCloud

If you are looking for a free way to restore contacts from iCloud directly, you are suggested to merge all contacts in your iCloud to your device. The advantage of this way is that it won’t replace your current contacts, but please note you can’t choose partial contacts to merge. Now, let’s see how to use this feature.

Go to Settings on your iPhone > iCloud > Sign in your iCloud account > Turn on Contacts if it is off  > Choose “Keep on My iPhone” > Click “Merge”.

Restore contacts from iCloud by using merge feature

Solution 2. Get contacts and more by restoring from iCloud

If you want to restore more than contacts, also messages, videos and so on from iCloud to a wiped device, or just set up a new iPhone, performing a whole restoration is a good option. But if your device is already used for a long time and has many newly-created contents, this way is not recommended as it will result in data loss.

Restore contacts from iCloud backup

Solution 3. How to selectively restore contacts from iCloud backup

If you prefer to get a part of contacts from iCloud instead of doing a full restoring, you need the help of some third-party backup files extractors and you can give iOS data recovery tool a try. There are some features of this tool you may be interested.

• Allow you to preview backup details and restore your needed contacts from iCloud backup.
• Retrieve other data such as notes, app data, etc from backup without resetting your iDevice.
• Support saving contacts as some readable formats of CSV and VCF for a easy reading and printing.

Now, you can get this tool installed on your PC/Mac and begin your restoring progress by following the below steps.

DownloadWindows versionDownloadMac version

Step 1. Open this software, connect iPhone to computer via data cable and choose “Recover from iCloud”.

Restore contacts from iCloud backup

Step 2. Click Next button, enter your Apple ID and password to log into iCloud account to scan your backups.

Enter Apple ID and password to log into iCloud account

Step 3. After scan, you can see all your iCloud backups, choose a related backup and click Download button. And the download time largely depends on the data size of your backup and network condition. After the downloading finished, click forward icon to go on.

Pick up one iCloud backup you need

Step 4. On the left side, choose “Contacts” to check your contacts with the details of name, create time and email address, pick up your wanted ones, and restore them directly to your iPhone or computer by clicking the bottom right corner.

How to restore contacts from iCloud without resetting iPhone

iOS Data Recovery is competent for restoring contacts as well other data like messages, photos, etc from iCloud backup. In addition, it can also retrieve contacts from iTunes backup to your iPhone or computer freely. And we do hope this post is helpful for you. You are welcomed to download this app and have a free try.