The company I work for uses Outlook 2011 for Mac (using a Microsoft Exchange account). A while back, I'd noticed that a few of my iPhone contacts were randomly in my Outlook contacts. It didn't bother me too much, so I didn't do anything about it at the time. But a few days ago I went back into my Outlook contacts to create a new contact group, and noticed that a lot more of my iPhone contacts (not all -- just a random bunch) had been added to Outlook. I thought it was strange, since I don't have my phone set to sync its contacts with Outlook (and I don't have it set to do so via Sync Services in Outlook itself, either). I DO have my phone set to sync all Exchange contacts (so, all company contacts), if that makes a difference. Anyway, I decided to delete those random contacts from Outlook since I don't need/want any personal contacts on my work account. Well, yesterday I come to find that not only were they deleted from Outlook, but they were deleted from my iPhone, too.

A quick search lead me to similar issues experienced by others, whose problems were solved by simply checking their deleted items folder in Outlook and restoring the contacts from there. Unfortunately, there are no deleted contacts to be found in mine -- just deleted emails. By default, our support group has it set to automatically purge deleted items after 30 days, but it's only been 2 or 3 since I deleted the contacts.

My next thought was to restore a previous backup of my iPhone, however, there isn't enough space left on my phone to do so. And of course, the error message from iTunes only says there isn't enough space on my phone to restore the backup -- it doesn't specifically tell me how much space I need. I'm assuming I'd probably have to first wipe my phone and THEN restore from backup. My only worry there is that I'd lose everything since the backup that would contain those lost contacts (which was in mid-September)... so photos, videos, contacts, etc. added since mid-September. Those files are saved to the most recent backup (from this morning), so maybe I'd be able to re-add them later or find some way to append the earlier backup with files from the new one. But for as much as I love Apple, they don't exactly make it easy to figure this stuff out on your own. So if there's a solution to be found via Outlook/my computer, I'd rather go that route first.

Okay. Now that all of the background info is out of the way, here are my questions:

1. Any ideas as to how I might be able to recover those contacts? For reference, I'm running OS X 10.8.5 (Mountain Lion) on a late 2011 MacBook Pro. My phone is an iPhone 5 running iOS 7.0.4. 

2. How the heck did these iPhone contacts even wind up in Outlook? I'm sure it was probably something I did at some point, but as I mentioned, I don't have either device set to sync my iPhone contacts with Outlook. And the fact that it wasn't ALL of my contacts is what really puzzles me… it was a random selection of contacts -- some old, some new, some friends, and some work people (but not work contact info -- just their personal cells/emails [not combined with their Exchange account info, either]). From what I can tell, there is no commonality among theses contacts, other than that were all originally added on my phone, but somehow wound up in Outlook. 

I think that about covers it. Sorry for the lengthiness -- just want to make sure I give as much detail as possible. If any of this needs clarity, or you need more info, let me know. 

Thanks in advance for any suggestions you can offer. Hopefully there's a solution here...