I had similar issues trying to backup contacts from an iPhone to the iCloud. I turned iCloud on and it prompted me to choose if I wanted to merge my iCloud cont

I had similar issues trying to backup contacts from an iPhone to the iCloud. I turned iCloud on and it prompted me to choose if I wanted to merge my iCloud contacts list and my phone list or if I wanted to delete my phone list and just import the iCloud list. I chose to merge the two. When it was done syncing, I had gone from ~400 contacts to 12 contacts for no apparent reason. I was going to undo it by restoring from a previous backup. So I go into iTunes and decide to backup the phone beforehand in case anything goes wrong. It was only then that I realized that the new backup deletes the older backup and I was SOL. iCloud is an unintuitive and buggy mess.