I deleted my MobileMe account within "Mail, Contacts, Calendars" in setting on my iPhone 4.
A couple of hours later I got a call from a number in Waltham, MA. It was my wife. I wondered where she was that she was using a landline or borrowing a cell phone, because the number showed up, rather than her name. I took a closer look at the number. It was her cellphone.
When I signed up for MobileMe to enable "Locate my iphone" my contacts became MobileMe contacts. When I deleted the MobileMe account the contact information vanished…
Nothing – all voicemails were numbers, contacts were gone.
I restored to factory default and restored – from an iCloud backup. This restored the contacts, but destroyed the apps – iCloud started downloads for all of the from the App Store, and about 20 of the 117 I have on the phone succeeded. The rest stuck at waiting. I tried shutdown and power on and restore from iTunes – no change. I tried emergency restart – no change, apps go back to waiting and then stall and nothing happens. Sigh.
I restored again, this time pointing to a local backup that wwas made when I upgraded IOS to 5.1.1. This worked great. It was from 6/20/2012, and I had made only a few tweaks from that time.
Which means I'll be managing backups locally instead of in the cloud. The local backup is 18GB in size, but it contains ALL of the apps, all of the data, and can be restopred from scratch predictably.
To kick off a backup manually – in iTunes, select the iPhone and right click (or equivalent "Cntl+ Click" is you don't have your Mac mouse set to right click). Select "Back Up".
Backups are stored by iTunes in Mac OS: ~/Library/Application Support/MobileSync/Backup.
In Windows it keeps changing:
Windows XP: %AppData%\Apple Computer\MobileSync\Backup Windows Vista: %AppData%\Roaming\Apple Computer\MobileSync\Backup Windows 7: %AppData%\Roaming\Apple Computer\MobileSync\Backup
—doug