We’ve all been there at one point or another. You’re going through your computer and cleaning out all the unnecessary information including your contact list. All of a sudden you have the sinking feeling that you’ve removed something you didn’t intend to.

Not to worry. Most people think that when you delete something off of a computer or the Internet (which is also just a bunch of computers), that it is gone for good. In some cases that may be true but for the most part, the data is still there waiting to be overwritten. If you act quickly, it is still retrievable.

Google has the ability to store many Gigabytes of information for each user so cleaning on a regular basis should not really be an issue. If however you’ve cleaned out your contact list and you want to restore it for whatever reason, here’s how you go about doing that.

How To Restore Google Contacts

Step 1: Visit the Google Contacts website at https://contacts.google.com/u/0/. This is the website where you manage all of the contacts you have stored on Google.

Step 2: Login to your account. Note that if you just visit the above URL in a browser, you still need to login to be managing your account. If you don’t log in, you won’t see anything.

Step 3: Restore contacts: Note that some posts on the Internet have you looking in the ‘more’ menu for restore contacts. Google changed this some time ago to read ‘Undo changes’. So on the left hand menu, look for the ‘more’ menu item with a down arrow next to it. In that list you’ll see ‘undo changes’.

Keep in mind that this undoes all changes, not just the contact deleting you have been up to. You can choose from one of the default time frames or you can undo using the custom setting which is probably the best option if you are trying to restore a contact you just deleted. Otherwise, any changes you made from the past hour will revert back to the way they were.

Step 4: that’s it. You don’t need to save anything after you’ve restored your deleted contacts. You will get a little information card from Google after you click undo that lets you know the time frame you selected and that all changes occurring within that time frame are about to be reverted.

Other things you can do with Google Contacts

Google Contacts is a pretty handy web-based contact management system. You can import contacts from some other service, export your contacts to a spreadsheet, label and organize your contacts and so much more!