Activesync lost all contacts

[kipp438]

Here's the story and I'll try to make it quick. Fyi I did try a search and looked through many pages and did not find what I needed.

Yesterday my Touch froze up, I did a soft reset, and it booted very slowly, when it finally got to the today screen, the touch screen did not work but some hard keys did. Called Alltel CS, told to do a hard reset but to back up my phone first. I did not previously have Outlook on my comp so I downloaded a trial version. Magically in the mean time, my phone went back to normal...wierd. Anyway, I thought I better still back up my contacts, just in case.

Well it would not sync, said different account or something. Call back Alltel CS. He had me open activesync, disconnect phone, delete device from activesync, then reconnect phone. It started the synchronization wizard. I then hung up with the CS guy. I went through the wizard, and came to a choice to sync from phone to comp, or comp to phone, or something similar. So I chose to sync from phone to comp, since I wanted my contacts on my phone to sync with my newly installed Outlook.

So the Sync looks like everything is working fine, but when it's done, ALL of my contacts are GONE! All of my other folders synced up just fine. Called CS back, said they dont know what happened, but my contacts are lost forever.

I tried the same thing I did before, unhook device, delete device from activesync, reconnect device, run sync wizard. This time, there is no option to choose device to comp, or comp to device. WTF?

I created a contact, re-synced, it put it into Outlook just fine. So I don't know what the hell is going on here, other than I have an ass-load of contacts to find and re-enter.

Any advice on how to be sure that this will not happen again?

Any thoughts on what the hell happened?

Thanks.