iOS7 Contacts Have All Disappeared

I upgraded to iOS 7 yesterday. Today, all my contacts suddenly vanished. They were working in iOS 7 this morning, but have since disappeared.

I'm not syncing contacts with an external system (Exchange, iCloud, Google, etc.). All of the contacts were on my phone only. They are still in my computer's Address Book, but when I sync to the phone and check the Contacts box under "Replace Information on This Phone," no contacts show up on the phone.

Phone favorites and text messages still exist, but as numbers only.

I could manually reenter them, but if there's an underlying problem, I don't want to spend the effort and then lose them again later.

Most Googling has returned no help for the current version. And solutions are to use things like iSync, which doesn't exist on Lion.


Finally found the solution. If this happens to you, try turning on (or turning off/on) the iCloud contact syncing, even if you don't think you're using it.

I turned it back on (I never realized it was on) and all my contacts came back. I guess the phone was using iCloud to sync contacts all along and I wasn't aware of it.