Merged my Contacts with iCloud and lost all new contacts

Question

Hi all,
Mac OSX Lion.  I made a bunch of new groups on my (desktop computer) contacts book, as I went through the contacts book, I reviewed and updated contact info for nearly a thousand contacts.  I spent literally hours parsing out my client contacts into three client contact groups that I made.
I realized that I had never turned on iCloud syncing in the iCloud preferences.  I turned on the Contacts Syncing option in the iCloud pref and was asked if I want to Merge my local contacts with iCloud.  I said Yes.  After the Merge was finished, the three new groups that I made had vanished, and all of the contacts that I had meticulously updated had gone back to their previous state.
Needless to say, this is really upsetting.  Anyone else seen this problem?  Any magic button I can press to bring back all of my hard work?
For what it is worth, after this fiasco, I decided to see if iCloud was working properly, created a few test contacts on my iPad, desktop computer, and notebook... all three worked perfectly by instantly sharing the info to each other. 
The main problem appears to have been the "Merge" when I turned iCloud syncing on after having created a lot of new contact info on my desktop computer.

Answer 1

Your daughter must have signed into your iCloud account, perhaps when she updated her phone.  You can confirm this by going to Settings>iClloud on her phone and seeing if she is using the same iCloud ID.
To fix this you would need to migrate her phone to a separate iCloud account.  To do this, start by saving any photo stream photos that she wishes to keep on your phone to her camera roll by opening her my photo stream album, tapping Select, tapping the photos, tapping the share icon (box with upware pointing arrow), then tapping Save to Camera Roll.
Then go to Settings>iCloud, tap Delete Account and provide the password when prompted to turn off Find My iPhone.  This only deletes the account from her phone, not from iCloud; it won't effect your device(s).  When you delete the account you will be asked if you want to keep or delete the iCloud data from her phone.  If she needs to migrate a copy of the data to her new account, choose Keep; otherwise, choose Delete.  Then sign back in with a separate Apple ID to create her new account and if migrating data to the new account, choose Merge when prompted.
Once she is on a separate account, if she migrated a copy of the data to her new account you can go to icloud.com from your computer, sign into her new iCloud account and delete your data from her account.