Hello.
Problem: While in a spree of adding new contacts to brand new phone, contact list have been partially deleted. No apparent pattern in what contacts got deleted. No apparent cause. Can the contacts be retrieved? What caused this? Can I add new contacts without fear of them disappearing again?
Background: I recently started using a FP2 and had no problem migrating over the contacts from my old phone since they were either stored on the sim card or on my google account. Now I’m helping my mother set up her new FP2 and migrate over from her old iphone 6. Her contacts seem to have been spread over several accounts and email clients, and she is also getting a new sim-card so transferring the contacts in the contact list have been tricky. She is doing this mostly by manually copying the contacts, which she started doing two days ago.
Today she discovered that many of the newly added contacts on her FP2 have been deleted completely or have had some of the contact fields deleted.
Possibly relevant information:
- MyPhoneExplorer revealed a few contacts believed to be deleted, but there was still only ~180 contacts where there should have been > 300 contacts.
- I can’t just copy over the contacts over from the iCloud account connected to the old iphone, as that list of contacts is incomplete. And I can’t use a security backup of the contacts since (to keep track of the contacts she hadn’t already copied over manually) my mother deleted the contacts (on the iphone) that were saved (onto the FP2). There was no backup made of all of the contacts before the process, so half of the contacts might be completely lost (I will make sure regular backups will be done in the future).
- There is also no security backup of the FP2 prior to the accounts disappearing.
- I updated to Android 7 on her phone maybe three days ago. the FAQ about updates to Android 7 on this forum mentioned that media files could (temporarily) seem to disappear as the media library rebuilt itself after the update - could something similar be at play here, with the contacts? If so, how long should it take for the background processes post-update to complete?
- We don’t know if any specific app has caused issues, as several new apps have recently been installed at the same time.
- We don’t know if this happened at a specific time or if contacts have been deleted
What I need help with:
- the ideal solution would be to somehow find a way to conjure up all those contacts that were deleted, but this might be too much to hope for.
- all suggestions about potential causes and how to rule them out or verify them are welcome. I have read other threads about partial or complete loss of contacts, but most of the people asking about it seem to have an idea about the cause.
Thank you for your time.