It all started when my Blackberry froze (the battery was full) and refused to turn on. There would be a red light, and the rebooting screen would appear, only to restart again when the reboot bar was about 1/10th complete. This cycle went on for nearly three hours. I thought the problem may have been due to outdated software or something, so I ran Desktop Manager and followed the prompts to install the latest one. Well the good news is that the phone managed to restart - the awful news is that it wiped ALL of my contacts, apps, and emails. The only things left are the stuff on my media card - a couple of pictures, that's it.

I freaked out and went on a good long search on all the Blackberry forums out there. There were no files listed under "Restore", and I couldn't find any IPD files on my computer. There was a lot of advice that involved Windows command prompts folders, but I'm a Mac user so a lot of these didn't translate. I had a poke around the "Device Memory" folder and found a WhatsApp file containing something called "messagestore.db" - it seemed pretty strange that it was there since all my other apps had been entirely wiped. Anyway, it made me think that perhaps there was a way of recovering all the information I lost - I have 8 years' worth of contacts in that phone and I'm really crushed over this! Please, PLEASE help!!!!!!!!! I'd really appreciate it!!!!!!!!!

(I'm pretty good with gadgets but I can get lost where stuff like codes and commands are concerned. So please be patient!)

Unless you backed up or sync'd with something, you are SOL.

Were you using BlackBerry Protect? Sync'ing with Google? ...

RU Serious? 8Yrs worth of contacts and you never did a single backup? No old backups? Did you check external harddrives? Did you use the universal search function on the Mac and search every single drive for "*.ipd" ? Did you use DMgr on another Mac Boot Profile? (Idk if Mac uses those)
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An Oh-By-The-Way: This is the real value of BlackBerry Protect. Install it. Set it to do automatic backups daily. And then forget about it until you need it.

the Horse is already out of the barn.

By the way the Bold is not 8 years old so unless you stopped the backup, DM should have tried to do a backup at some point.

The answer to your question is - no they cannot be recovered without a backup. And please don't hijack others threads.

I'm not sure if you mentioned it, but is the phone CDMA or GSM? While most of the data is definitely gone, there's a chance that you have contacts listed on the SIM card (assuming you use one)