It is very important to have a solid backup that can help you retrieve your contacts once they get lost. I am sure that your Gmail contacts are quite important to you and thus loosing them completely is something that you wouldn’t want. However, what happens if you accidentally delete a contact? What do you do if your toddler grabs the keyboard and deletes some of your important contacts? What happens if someone hacks into your Gmail account and deletes some of your most important contacts that you may not have saved in other locations? Well, the short answer is that you can restore your contacts if they happen to get lost. This guide contains 5 steps on how to restore Gmail contacts.

1. Log in to your Gmail account

The first thing to do is to log in to your Gmail account. After you have logged into your account, you will be able to see which contacts are present and which ones are missing. After you have clearly identified which contacts are missing and you actually need to restore them, then you can proceed to the next step below.

2. Click Contacts

When you click to contacts you are supposed to find all the contacts that you have saved into your Gmail account. In the case that you deleted a contact by mistake or somebody hacked and deleted the contact then keep going.

3. Click to Open the More Action Menu.

When you go and click the more action menu, you will find various options including find and merge duplicates, print, import, export, delete contacts, merge contacts and restore contacts.

4. Select Restore Contacts from the Options

You should ignore all other options and click to restore contacts. When you click the option, you will be told that you can actually restore all your contacts to a previous state up to 30 days into the past. This is a great way to recover deleted items, undo an import or even undo a merge. You will be asked to select a time that you would like to restore to. The time category includes 10 minutes ago, 1 hour ago, yesterday, a week ago and custom.

5. Choose Time and Click Restore.

You will want to make sure that you pick a time that you are sure of since you can’t go forward in time. Once you are done with that process, then you can click restore. Once you click restore, all the contacts that you had deleted by mistake or if someone had hacked your account will actually be back in your list.