I recently left a job that initially gave me a iPhone 3G ~3 years ago. When I upgraded to a 4S I just transferred the settings over.
When I left I decided to delete my email account because why would I need it anymore. So I remove the account from the iPhone and went to eat a bagel.
Imagine my surprise when I come back to my phone to call my sister except iPhone tells me I only know about 8 people.
Apparently the iPhone tied all my contacts with the company account so when I deleted that, there went all my contacts with it.
No problem right, I'll just retrieve my backup from my computer from the last time I synced and I'll get my contacts back and then I'll figure out how to transfer over the contacts.
Except apparently when I got this phone with iCloud it turned off backups when I synced with my computer. Okay no problem, iCloud should have it right?
Except iCloud has been telling me that it doesn't have enough space to backup my stuff for weeks. I just assumed that meant my apps weren't getting backed up, which is fine. But apparently they don't update anything else, even if you've already backed it up (this is definitely not all Apple's fault, but iCloud is pretty confusing about its backup rules). Not sure why I couldn't retrieve my contacts from right before when I deleted them but they were no where to be found.
So finally I just bit the bullet and synced with an old backup and lost about 3-4 months worth of text messages. Yay.
I'm pretty sure that the iPhone asks you if you want to keep a local copy of your contacts & calendars when you remove an Exchange account, so you may have hit "No" on accident.
Sounds like you were using an exchange server for your work, and you were storing all your information on that server. Could have been avoided by not storing personal data on your work servers and making sure you have the settings set to store them on the device itself or MobileMe/iCloud.
This kind of behaviour is probably something businesses like. Info on company servers stays on the servers.
This isn't an "iDevice" issue, it's a data ownership issue.
Yeah I too was on an Exchange server. I had no idea it was storing on only Exchange/that one account. Really hard to discern where it was saving contacts to, hence why I had about 8 or so contacts left over when I deleted the account.
When I left I decided to delete my email account because why would I need it anymore. So I remove the account from the iPhone and went to eat a bagel.
Imagine my surprise when I come back to my phone to call my sister except iPhone tells me I only know about 8 people.
Apparently the iPhone tied all my contacts with the company account so when I deleted that, there went all my contacts with it.
No problem right, I'll just retrieve my backup from my computer from the last time I synced and I'll get my contacts back and then I'll figure out how to transfer over the contacts.
Except apparently when I got this phone with iCloud it turned off backups when I synced with my computer. Okay no problem, iCloud should have it right?
Except iCloud has been telling me that it doesn't have enough space to backup my stuff for weeks. I just assumed that meant my apps weren't getting backed up, which is fine. But apparently they don't update anything else, even if you've already backed it up (this is definitely not all Apple's fault, but iCloud is pretty confusing about its backup rules). Not sure why I couldn't retrieve my contacts from right before when I deleted them but they were no where to be found.
So finally I just bit the bullet and synced with an old backup and lost about 3-4 months worth of text messages. Yay.