I just updated to iOS5 and all my contacts are gone!

I updated to iOS 5 and before it applied the update it said "Backing up Marc's iPhone".
After the update, I went to load back my contacts and it says: "iTunes could not restore the iPhone "Marc's iPhone" because the backup session failed.
It would have been nice to mention that at the time, before I lost all the content.
I can see no way back from this.
I've gone back to another backup, and that says the same thing.  Apparently, all my sessions have been quietly failing.
So, assuming I can actually source them again, I now have to type in around 300 contacts, by hand, one at a time.
I will never buy another Apple product.

I've backed up and restored contacts before, and it's been fine.
But since the IOS 5 "upgrade", it seems that things don't work so well.
I can't restore from the backup that the update took, nor from older backups.
As luck would have it, I remembered that I tried syncing contacts to Google a while back, so I've recovered *some* items from there by setting up the sync again (iOS/iTunes had managed to lose it, along with all my email accounts etc).  Google also lets you export your contacts to a CSV file, which is a bonus.
I'm not sure about why some contacts were synced to Google and others not, I'll look into that later.
All my photos are lost, apparently forever.
Next time I buy a phone, it will be one where I can just drag'n'drop to copy files.  Probably Android- I'll certainly not buy another Apple product.
I'm curious about some of what you say: why go through the setup ON THE PHONE?  What difference does it make?
I'm reluctant to do anything much more interesting now- it seems that I can no longer trust iTunes (never liked it much, I have to say: I don't find it at all intuitive).

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