The 200 or so contacts in my MobileMe contact list have disappeared!

They were there last night, but when I got an SMS from my girlfriend this morning, I thought it was strange that it showed her number, not her name!

I then checked my Contact List and there were no contacts on my iPhone, so I logged onto MobileMe and that is empty too!

I'm hoping the contacts are still on my Mac at home!!! Mail and calendar seem to be unaffected, but I'd like to know what the heck is wrong with my contacts!

Is there any way of recovering them?

Update: Used the on-line support feature on the Apple support website. Chatted to Patrick U. her wasn't really able to help, I need to check and see if my contacts are still on my home iMac!

It looks like the problem might have been caused by installing iTunes 9 and registering my iTunes account on the work machine yesterday.

I already had MobileMe set up to sync Safari bookmarks and allow access to iDisk, but I think something went phooey when iTunes 9 installed, I have some of my contacts in Windows Contacts (we use Exchange, so MobileMe refuses to synch with Outlook)...

SOLVED!

I got home and the iMac had all of my contacts still! I backed them all up to an archive, then manually synched with MobileMe. It took a while, but it worked. MobileMe is showing the contacts again and they all seem to be back on my iPhone.

Interestingly, I switched on my PC as well and that is resyncing everything!

I think the problem was me setting up my work PC with my iTunes account, so that I could run some tests on my nuked iPod Touch for rolling out profiles and applications to the new iPhones, when they arrive...

Hmm, my iPhone and Me have lost my contacts again! This is getting annoying!!! Not sure what the heck is going on here.

Just re-synching them again to MobileMe. Luckily the master collection on my iMac seems to remain unaffected, it is just MobileMe and my iPhone which get messed up! Really annoying when I need to phone or email a contact when out and about!

This started with 3.1 and iTunes 9...

Update:

Just spent about an hour online with MobileMe chat support. Very friendly and patient.

We cancelled the sync, reset the iSync database, then started again, with just contacts. It took around 15 minutes or so for it to actually complete the sync process, but the contacts were there at the end.

The problem was, it loaded all contacts, deleted them and reloaded them!

ARRGGGHHHH! It has just done it again! I think the problem was, I put the machine to sleep when I leave the house, or I am not using it and it was probably at the part of the process where it had deleted the contacts, but not reloaded them...

Why it takes 15 minutes and why it needs to delete all contacts, as opposed to just passing changes is beyond me.

Can you change the sync settings on that machine so it doesn't automatically delete and reload your contacts?

The only options seem to be to sync contacts or not sync contacts. It should never delete them...

I think the problem is that the Ids locally aren't being updated properly, so it is seeing 100% new contacts.

Hmm, I unregistered the iMac, then re-registered it. I also deleted the indexes to the Address Book.

It took about 15 minutes to synchronise the contacts, then I shut down the iMac, before it could delete the contacts from MobileMe again!

I'll test it further when I get back home this evening!

Interestingly, my contact list has 77 contacts in it, but the size of the address book directory is 23MB! Does it reduce the size of the images used against contacts, or does it hold them at the original size? The images range from 1.2MP through to 12MP...

I'm hoping that is why it takes 15 minutes to synchronise the first time.

Also, before removing and re-registering my iMac, MobileMe was continually showing my iMac as never have been syncrhonised, even though it has just completed a sync! After removing and reregistering, it is showing a successful synchronisation. I hope that has solved the problem, for now.