Recovering contacts from iPhone backup

So my wife had her contacts deleted for no apparent reason and there's no information from Apple about it.
Also, there's a rumor that this happens when Whatsapp/Messages crashes and causes the contacts to be deleted.

I think this is the biggest blunder that any phone maker can make. "Contacts gone? You should've backed it up into iCloud or sync it with your GMail" is utterly bullshit. I don't see contacts disappear on dumbphones like the 3320. The handphone is supposed to keep all your contacts, not removing it without any reason.

Anyways, since its been a long time I've written anything long, this is what I found and did over the course of 3 days googling the crap out of the internet and actually finding a solution thru a random google search.

My google-fu is not strong, apparently.

Pre-requisites:

• There MUST be a previously backed up version of the iPhone on your PC. Or any PC for that matter. This won't work if you don't have a backup.
• Does not matter if the iPhone was synced to the iCloud or not. We're not gonna use that anyway.
• Not sure if this works for encrypted backups.
• Not sure which iTunes version was used to take the backup, but my current version is iTunes 10? Shit I can't even check what version my iTunes is.

So, first:
Download iphone-backup-browser from the project page (its a coding project by some guy who really needs creds for his work. Saved a ton of time, effort and money for us helpless people abandoned by Apple). The direct download link is here.

I love portable software btw. Enough of installing bullshit software that you're just gonna use once.

Second:
Extract the file and run the executable (iPhoneBackupBrowser).

Select which backup that you'd want to use. The software does mention which date the backup was taken.

Click on save contacts as vcards.

Now you've extracted all your contacts as individual vcard files (.vcf).

Third:
Now since you have a bunch of individual vcards, it'll be a shit ton of time and tapping your phone to import all of them one by one.

Therefore, you'll want to put all the contacts in one vcard file.

Taken from one of Google's product forums on importing multiple vcards at once:

Yes - you need to concatenate all the VCFs in to a single file 
...if you're using windows: 
# get a command prompt 
Windows_Key + R 
run: cmd 
# change to the directory where all your VCFs are stored 
d: 
cd   \my_vcfs 
# Run this command 
copy   /B   *.vcf   all_in_one.vcf 

Then just upload the "all_in_one.vcf" file to google and it will grab all your contacts in one go

But in my case, it was:

Start + R

cmd 

cd desktop

cd extracted from backup

copy   /B   *.vcf   all_in_one.vcf 

So now I have all my contacts in this all_in_one.vcf file in the same folder of my gazillion other vcf files.

Fourth:
Attach the "all_in_one.vcf" file onto an email (I used gmail btw) and sent it to my wife's iPhone.

Opened the attachment.

And viola, "Add 54,329 contacts".

Also, instead of merge, just choose Create new just in case. You can delete any duplicated contacts if you'd like later.


And thats it (usually I run out of gas after 20 minutes writing and finish any post very sloppy at the end, lel).