Recovering Contacts

Hi,
My father accidentally synced his iphone with my moms PC.... all his contacts were deleted and synced with my mother's Outlook ( no contacts ) so he went back to his PC to "Recover From Backup" but when he connected his Iphone, ITunes automatically created a backup over the old backup!
so he tried to recover his iphone but the new backup has no contacts

is there a way to retrieve the older backup ?
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I'm familiar with recovery application; can I treat the Iphone as a HDD and recover all the files? I might be lucky to find the files

yup, you can recover from any backup (hopefully he has more than one).

this Apple page has more info:

iTunes: Backing up, updating, and restoring your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch software
(expand this section Restoring your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch).

" you can recover from any backup "
the problem is that he has only one backup and it had been overwritten by Itunes with the backup without the contacts ......
is there a way to mount the iphone as a disk so I can run recovery tool on it ?

Ok, that's kind of odd, iTunes tends to name and time each backup separately, in fact I didn't think it ever over-wrote these files, hence the reason I have so many of them in my iTunes backup folder.

Annoyingly the backups are mashed up and I'm not sure if there is a way to reconstruct the files into something useful if iTunes doesn't want to play nice any more...

For your info, the files are located here: (OS X)

~/Library/Application Support/MobileSync/Backup

If you have a Mac and leopard or better then hopefully you have time machine running every-now-and-then (right?) if so then just recover this folder from a backup and re-sync and restore the iPhone.

If you have a windows machine then I believe the backups are stored here, again this will be a simple problem to resolve if you have some kind of backup system running:

XP: %AppData%\Apple Computer\MobileSync\Backup
Vista: %AppData%\Roaming\Apple Computer\MobileSync\Backup
7: %AppData%\Roaming\Apple Computer\MobileSync\Backup

Now if you don't have any kind of backup system running on your chosen OS then I am not sure how far you will get with recovering data from the phone itself, mainly because I don't know what the data looks like on the phone itself, if it's just a copy of the above folder locations then you might be onto a winner but I have no idea if that would be possible at all, sorry I know that doesn't help but I really wouldn't know where you'd start on recovering data from your phone, well this type of stuff anyway, music and photos would be easy enough but just not sure about the contact stuff.

Good luck.