Contacts are gone

Question

This past Friday night (6/26/09) my iPhone went dark. I tried powering it on and off, and hitting the home button, but nothing worked. I plugged it into a charger and nothing would come up on the screen. I cleaned the sensor areas to ensure it didn't think it was up against something.
After looking in the help section, I then noticed to hold the power and home buttons both down for 10 seconds. That reset it.
Saturday morning (6/27/09) I upgraded to 3.0 and then found all of my contacts were gone. My calendar entries, my recent phone calls, and my pictures are all still there, but my contacts are gone.
I was able to enter some of my recently called numbers into my contacts, but it would randomly assign old contact photos to the new contacts, matching up random photos to people.
I tried uploading contacts from the SIM card, but nothing happens.
Does anyone know how to recover the contacts? I have seen people having issues with double contacts, but never losing them entirely.
Just an FYI, when upgrading in the past, I connected to my PC at work, but in this case, I upgraded from home where I rarely connect with my iPhone.
Thanks,
Kara

Answer 1

The iPhone is designed to be synced with a supported application on your computer for contacts with the ability to sync contacts with the supported application on multiple computers.
Contacts are included with your iPhone's backup along with other iPhone data, but it isn't a good idea to depend on your iPhone's backup alone for this data.
The iPhone does not support storing contacts or any data on the SIM card, which is limited to a name and 2 phone numbers and maybe a single email address for contacts.
You can try restoring your iPhone with iTunes from your iPhone's backup.
Out of curiousity since I see the same reported often by Windows users, how do you get by without having any contact info available on your computer? If only email addresses are available for your contacts on your computer, and if only phone numbers are available for your contacts on your iPhone and the same with previous phones used, wouldn't it be beneficial to consolidate all contact info into one central location on your computer which can be kept synchronized with your iPhone? For every contact - their name, company, business and personal email addresses, business and personal phone numbers, and business/personal physical and mailing addresses all in one place.