Looking for some advice here. Woke up last week to a completely dead iPhone 12mini even though it was fully charged as I went to bed. I took it to the Apple store later that morning to fix it but I couldn't remember my AppleID password (it was saved in my phone, I know…) so had to provide proof of purchase from Optus before they gave me a new phone (no parts for the repair).
I used my old iPhone SE to get into my AppleID and change my password/do a restore on my new phone but everything has came back from 2017, the phone even acts likes it's 2017! I changed from the SE to the 12mini back in Feb and don't pay for extra storage so really just want a restore to sometime in the recent past to retrieve all of my contacts and possibly apps although that may not be possible. Contacts are more important. Any idea's how to do this?
Sounds like you haven't backed up the 12 Mini to be able to restore it. Do you still have it and is it operational to do so? If not and you haven't got iCloud backups enabled then might have lost all your data on it.