Why are my contacts being replaced by my daughters?

Question

My daughter logged into my iCloud account so my contacts appeared on her iPhone and hers on mine. She didn't want all my contacts on her phone so deleted them and kept hers. However when she was deleting them she also deleted them off my iPhone too. I tried restoring my iPhone from the last back up and my contacts appear but eventually all of mine disappear and are replaced by her contacts. I have restored my phone several times and the same thing keeps happening! We all have logged out of my iCloud but the same thing happens! I want my contacts back ASAP.... What can I do? HELP

Answer 1

When you share an account, any actions anyone takes on their device (such as deleting contacts) will be mirrored on all the other devices.  That's what iCloud does; syncs changes to all your devices sharing the account.
To prevent this from happening, you should consider migrating your daughter's phone to a separate account.  You can do this and still share the same ID for other services such as purchasing from the iTunes store.  To migrate to a new account, start by saving any photo stream photos that you she wants to keep to her camera roll (unless already there) by opening your my photo stream album, tapping Select, tapping the photos, tap the share icon (box with upward facing arrow), then tapping Save to Camera Roll.  If she is syncing notes with iCloud that she want to keep, you'll need to open each of your notes and email them to her so she can later copy and paste the text into new notes created in her new account.  Then go to Settings>iCloud, tap Delete Account (which only deletes it from this device, not from iCloud; your phone won't be effected by this), provide the password to turn off Find My iPhone and choose Keep on My iPhone when prompted.  Then sign back in with a different Apple ID to create her new account and choose Merge to upload the data to the new account.  Once you are on separate accounts, you can each go to icloud.com and delete the other person's data from your account.
After doing this, you'll need to follow this user tip to restore your contacts from your last iCloud backup: https://discussions.apple.com/docs/DOC-4841.  As you'll see, this involves pulling the internet connection from your wifi router (or just turning it off) during the restore process as soon as your phone restarts.  That will allow you to turn off iCloud contacts syncing and save the recovered contacts to your phone.  Then you can restore the internet connection, allow the restore process to complete, then delete your daughter's contacts from your account (if you haven't already done so) and enable iCloud contacts syncing again to merge the recovered contacts with your account.