Restore iPhone, but lost 9 months worth of contacts

Hi, I have a MacBook Pro, iTunes, and an iPhone with iOS 4.2.

I just restored my iPhone from a backup. And contacts HAVE been restored, going back to April 2010! I have lost 9 months worth of contacts.
But I have backed up my iPhone at LEAST once per month.
I checked Mac Address Book, and it has the exact set of contacts I had 9 months ago.

Is there a way I can get to the IPHONE backup, to restore all of my contacts?
Thanks much... this is very important!!

Are you sure you selected the most recent backup?

Are you saying that the contacts stored in Address Book on your MBP (not your iPhone) have now been altered the reflect its contents 9 months ago?

Do you use Time Machine to backup your MBP?

Am I sure about the most recent backup? Yes I used Saturday Jan 9th 2011.
Has MBP's address book been overwritten? No, apparently it has never been updated since April 2010.
Also I am not using Time Machine. My hard disk is small (250GB) and I'm running a lot of here.

Chances are you restored from an old backup. It's a pity you're not a MobileMe member, but oh well.

It's an ENORMOUS pity you're not running Time Machine. That would have fixed that problem almost instantly.

All I can suggest is that you look in ~/Library/Application Support/MobileSync/Backup and find the backup that was made a month ago. Resist the temptation to use a backup more recent than a month ago (if there's one in there), as that may well perpetuate the problem you're having!

chas_m said:

Chances are you restored from an old backup. It's a pity you're not a MobileMe member, but oh well.

Click to expand...

THAT!

Seriously. Over the Air syncing and so on is where it's at. When I set up my iPhone 4 it took all of 30 seconds for my whole contacts list to transfer from the MM server to my Phone. No loss at all.