ios: restore locally saved contacts My boss accidentally removed the locally saved contacts from his device.
If I login on his account on iCloud, there's nobody in the contacts app.
On the icloud website  I can try to recover contacts, but that option also tells me there is nothing to recover
He doesn't seem to have any icloud backups.
Basically he never used anything iCloud, there really are no backups.  

I did see some shareware tools that pretend to recover contacts. Is this really possible? Will they really look for locally deleted items and recover them or are they just 'scams' that make it easy to recover contacts that are backedup somewhere.
I don't want to pay for software that will not recover anything anyway.

he has the latest iphone, probably with the latest update.
I tried several applications in trial mode; and all of them do require a backup.
He learned the hard way to make backups.