All offline contacts gone after phone update

Hi.
After the last system update (8901.3.A.0033.20200815) all of my offline contacts are gone. I use the Google Contacts App. Ist there a way to restore my contacts?

Greetings Björn

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I have the same problem! This is a minor catastrophe… No app finds the old contacts. To my surprise I could not find anything on the internet that Android 10 dumps offline/phone stored contacts, which was my initial hunch…

Any help very welcome, I don’t want Google to know my contacts…

EDIT: Installed Simple Contacts Pro from F-Droid, imported old .vcf BAckup - think I’m back in business. Used this ooportunity to also replace the dialer by matching Simple Dialer - looks nice.

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Worth a try …


Does it work?

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Update: The Simple Contacts Pro also puts the contacts by default in the Google account .-( and it says: if I don’t: Other apps can’t see them… OK, Sync with Google is off, so hopefully they stay on the phone… I start to hate Google for its grwing intrusion… Seems I at some point will need to switch to Lineage…

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Hi guys,

sorry to hear about your issues with lost offline contacts.

Modern operating systems offer a cloud backup of important user data for convenience. This comes in especially handy when you get a new device and can set it up from the backup.

Google is no exception here. Please note that since Android 9 the backups are end-to-end encrypted:

So backing up your data to Google Drive does not mean that Google knows your contacts.

If you deliberately choose not to use the cloud backup, you have to take care of a backup strategy yourself. And it is clearly the worst idea to keep important data like contacts in one place only – your phone, which could just die any time.

A minimal approach would be a regular manual export of you contacts. A more comfortable way could be a sync to a cloud service that you trust more than Google. I personally use Mailbox.org and DAVx5 for this, a self-hosted NextCloud might also be a viable option.

Good luck with getting you data back and finding a proper backup solution for the future!

Best wishes,
Thomas

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It should be possible to export all the contacts to the sd card.
The file I get I then mail to my email address.

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I think my main concern is that there was no forewarning. I did a backup not too long ago, so I did not lose too much in the end. And I am still surprised that I can’t find anything on this on the internet - is it really true that Android 10 has no longer phone-only contacts? maybe it’s just a Fairphone issue?

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Update:
I tried MyPhoneExplorer to find my old contacts. But even this tool couldn’t find any contact.

I couldn’t create with the Contacts App phone-only contacts. But with MyPhoneExplorer I can create an initial phone-only contact. After this step I can create phone-only contacts with the app.

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Hello,

I have updated my FP3 with Android 10 and now all my contacts stored on the phone does’nt show any more in contact app.
I can’t create contacts on the phone any more only creating on google account is available.

Regards.

Nicolas

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Welcome to the community forum!
I moved your post here to avoid duplicates.

i have the same problem. please fix it asap!

Welcome to the community forum.

We as a community forum can’t fix this, and Fairphone staff might read along here and engage occasionally, but there’s no guarantee.

It is therefore important to contact Fairphone support directly, so that they can take care of the issue and get an idea of the scope of it.

https://support.fairphone.com/hc/en-us

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Hi,
I had also lost all my phone contacts.
I’ve checked and restablished the webdav syncronisation to outlook and nextcloud and all vanished contact names are back.
Try it.
Peter

I was redirected here from thread FP3 3.A.0033, Android10 OS update, security patch level July 5th, 2020 which is more about the Android 10 upgrade in general, e.g. the usual appearance and the lack of any warnings & instructions, while I’d definitely prefer to have a clear, prominent information that it’s not a simple update but an upgrade.

After the upgrade , most of my contacts are invisible, i.e. all contacts saved locally on the device and not in the cloud. Like others, I was unable to find on the www how to turn them visible again , but only how to move cloud saved contacts to local or vice versa - which is not fitting my case. I recall I did several changes since the last backup, hence, I would strongly prefer not to restore it. Does anyone know to show these contacts again? Maybe by simply installing MyLocalAccount? Thank you, Georg

I have the same problem.

I inserted my SIM card into a different phone, and it read all the contacts, which means that the contacts are still on the SIM card, Fairphone 3 with Android 10 just can’t read them (at least in my case).

I made a support request, so let’s hope this gets fixed soon.

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Welcome to the community forum.

If the contacts are on the SIM card, this is not necessarily the same problem which is discussed here.

Did you try to import the contacts from the SIM card to the phone? The Contacts App should offer this functionality in its settings (mine does, although I don’t run the stock OS).
This would nowadays be the standard Android way of handling SIM card contacts. Everything else would need extra Apps or Android customisations by the phone vendor, as far as I recall (so other Android phones could indeed handle those contacts differently).

The problem discussed here is about contacts which were bound to the local contact storage on the phone (as opposed to an online sync provider like Google), but with the Android 10 upgrade this storage seems to have disappeared along with the contacts in it.

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I thought the data may still exist in the file system, but is just not any more accessible via GUI.

Does anyone know how to access the local contacts via file system on Fairphone3 standard ROM? Total Commander search for *.vcf did not find them, the path /data/data/com.android.providers.contacts/databases/contacts.db mentioned by UnlockUnit can’t be accessed as my phone is not rooted - but AFAIK rooting means clearing all user data, so exactly the data I want to re-gain.

Does anyone know how to go back (=downgrade) to Android 9 without a factory reset? For FP2, the downgrade support article mentions a factory reset as mandatory. For FP3, I can only find a download of Android10 not 9 - for 9 I just find the release information, not the ROM files. Even if I had them, manually installing a ROM will AFAIK clear all user data - so exactly the data I want to re-gain. PS: I had linked all the articles but was disallowed to post with more than 2 links, so I removed some.

For what it’s worth …


Seems to be the case. I didn’t do it myself yet, but everything I’ve read so far says the same. Here’s confirmation for a downgrade from Fairphone OS (Android 10) to /e/ (Android 9) …

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same problem here! … the option ‘phone’ for storing the contacts vanished…
since I am a simple user and no expert I’ll try to find someone who can restablish webdav sync … and so on … but I don’t have outlook , phew …

I have the same problem. I stored my contacts on my phone. when i got the fairphone3, i had to create a “device” account first, instead of using a google account, to import my stored contacts. i can not find that option anymore. is there a way to import my contacts to my phone, without syncing to google? (i don’t want to sync to google, as i have multiple google emails for different parts of my life, and my phone needs to have all the contacts)

is there already a way to get back all the contacts i added between the old backup and this update?

if i had a “device” account for the contacts, where would they even be stored?

i’m rather upset there was no warning and now it’s all gone and i can’t even import the old contacts…