Want to retrieve lost contacts, but as a reboot and not an Outlook sync

Question

Hope this makes sense. Wife and I are both iPhone users, but access iTunes on a PC for updates. This point, as you will see, seems relevant. When I want to add new music I have to add it to my folder and sync my entire music collection instead of just adding the new songs. If I just sync the new songs, it erases what I had and will add only the new stuff.
Along those lines.....wife wasn't getting email and her IT guy offered to get it going again. In the process, he set it up to where the phone recieved her work Outlook contacts "over-the-air", and she went from about 70 contacts she wanted in her iPhone, to about 500 that didn't even include the original ones she cared about. I went into the setting and turned that function off, but now it is completely empty.
When the phone locked up once last year, the guys at the Apple Store gave her a new one. I was able to boot it up in iTunes, and it basically restored everything she had, including, I'm fairly sure, her contacts. I thought that I now could restore the phone, and have all the settings that were present when I updated the software after the new release last week.
But...from what I can tell, when I go to "restore" I get prompted that the phone is going to create a template of how it is NOW. I don't want that, I want the settings from the last software upgrade. Any advice? Thanks.

Answer 1

Incidentally, my first thought was to map a network share from the NAS to my computer, so that my music files appear on the Z: drive, say on my computer. I could then set up iTunes to store music etc in that folder, and to copy all new items to that folder. However, if I do that, all that'll happen is that on my NAS, the library file will become out of date as I add music to the collection but not to the index.