iCloud and contacts management

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Wondering if anyone can help with this. I did a search and found an abundance of questions on this but no answers to my particular issue.

I upgraded from the iPhone 3G to the 4S and my four imported a big mess of contacts from all of my address books on my various email accounts. In addition, I have a lot of cell numbers in my old phone that are not in any of those places. I asked at the Apple store how I can bring all this together, clean it up, and most importantly get the numbers from the old phone to the new one.

The "genius" at the Apple store (and I use that term loosely :Smirk:) told me to start by logging into iCloud and syncing to bring my contacts from my phone to iCloud. So I did as he told me and I'm sure you don't need me to tell you what happened. Yes, my phone got wiped out.

So my questions are:

1. Is there any way to recover all those numbers?
2. Does anyone have a recommended step-by-step website to get iCloud properly set up (I've googled without success thus far).

I'm now afraid to plug in my new phone to iCloud for fear it will wipe it, too, and I'll be left with nothing.

Thanks!
 
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Did you have your old phone backed up in iTunes? If so, just connect your old phone and restore it from a backup.
Will need a little more info on what your trying to set up in iCloud. Your new phone?
 
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Thanks so much for your reply. Okay, I've done some work and here's where I'm at. I did have a backup in the "Address Book" icon on my Mac so I dumped those into my phone along with the other mess then went into hotmail contacts and cleaned it all up and now here is what I have that I am trying to get to iCloud:

- all contacts from my hotmail address book
- all contacts from my work contacts address book (personal work contacts list, not global)

Right now, I have set up both my hotmail and my work (exchange) mail on my iPhone4 and so all contacts are on the phone (albeit in two different merged address books).

So my next step is trying to figure out how to get these two address books (each makes up about 50% of 125 contacts) into iCloud from the phone so that I can have everything managed from one place going forward.

If I type a new address into the phone, it goes into iCloud, and vice-versa, but for some reason I can't get the contacts on the phone to upload to iCloud. I've tried:

- turning off the contacts in iCloud on the phone then turning it back on to force it to sync
- clicking the "Back Up Now" button in iCloud in on the phone
- clicking the "refresh contacts" in the web version of the iClouds address book

There still remains nothing in my iCloud contacts book. Anything I haven't tried that you can share would be super!

Thanks so much!
 
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I used the mac address book; I selected my exchange contacts, hit cmd-a then cmd-c to copy; then selected my iCloud address book and hit cmd-v to paste them all. In a few minutes all of my pasted contacts were in iCloud.
 
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Oh okay I didn't realize I could do that! Excellent! Now...to get the contacts off my iPhone and into the address book and I'm good to go. I will give that a shot, thank you so much for your help! :)
 
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Update: My contacts will not sync from my iPhone to the address book :( It says it's syncing but the address book remains empty. Any thoughts appreciated. Thanks! :)
 

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