Dear community,
after a (seeming) flawless upgrade from FP Open 17.04.0 (Android 5.1) to FP Open 17.06.4 (Android 6) I now lost all of my contacts! I upgraded my phone yesterday and until 3pm this afternoon I did not experience any issues - all of my apps, as well as my contacts, worked as usual. I then received a call from a friend and wondered why my FP displayed the number only. After hanging up I opened my contacts and found myself desperate as all of them are gone. 
What shall I do? How did that happen?
If you have any ideas on how I could retrieve my contacts, I will be more than grateful. Thanks in advance!
I guess weāre not going into the direction of restoring a backup or reestablishing a sync?
In Settings - Apps - Contacts - Permissions (or something along those lines, sorry, German phone here) is access to contacts and storage allowed?
Can you install a different App that does something with the contacts and have a look whether the contacts are visible there? I have never used anything else, so I can only guess what could perhaps work ā¦ My Contacts?
same here. it happend after i openend skype.
skype asked me if i would want to sync my contacts - i denied, cause i havenāt sync before.
āgladā iām not alone.
i tried to export the contacts with āexport contactsā found at f-droid. there isnāt any contact data on the phone left.
(iām done with the fp2 for now. itās not the first major neg experience i have. )
Please donāt give up. Neither hope nor the Fairphone.
If you have any kind of Backup, this may help:
https://forum.fairphone.com/t/accidentally-updatet-to-android-6-phone-doesnt-respond/29653/10?u=catfish&source_topic_id=29678
path data/ seems to be empty. at least it says so in amaze.
Itās not empty, itās just that Amaze canāt list contents in /data without root permissions. Check Amaze settings and enable āRoot explorerā
Understandable. If youāre totally pissed of and youāre going to take a break from FP2 (like I did refurbishing a Moto G in the past), I suggest looking for a second-hand phone with official LineageOS support, and wait until FP2 gets official status as well to change again to it. Otherwise, you can try the unofficial LineageOS community build (which may have minimal bugs but seems stable enough).
With any of those options, you would have less issues than with FP Open, and having very great developers actively working on them is a plus.
1 Like
\data\usr\com.android.providers.contacts\databases\contacts2.db\contacts
there is only one contact in the sheet. the one i added todayā¦
thanks for the lineage hint. i just need a stable pocket computer to make calls, short messages, mails, maps, the browser, the camera and files. and i donāt mind when an app crashes. no need for more.
1 Like
Thank you for your suggestions, but like @sj2010 I was not able to retrieve my original file (neither on the phone, nor via my pc).
āLuckilyā, I found a contacts-backup from last year, which allowed me to restore about 80% of my contacts. Nevertheless, I had to spend two hours trying to restore the remaining contacts by analyzing my call log and text messages. Guess I will back up more regularly from now on.
Apart from this admittedly frustrating experience, I am quite satisfied with the update and the changes it has entailed.
1 Like
For the future I recommend to set up a Raspberry Pi or similar with Nextcloud to have contacts, calendars synced with dav. This is also great for filesync. With this you always have the same data on every device. You will never lose your data again.
2 Likes
So now iāve updated to 17.06.4 as mentioned above.
The phone now works!
Plus, all my apps are still installed.
But their settings and my contacts are lost.
Is there any way to get my contacts back?
The setting, i guess, are gone forever?
I did backup some folders via USB. Would replacing the respective folders help getting anything back?
Still thanking you!
C.S.
2 Likes
I donāt think you can get the settings back from restoring a folder, but sure for the contacts that should work.
Err ā¦
Any idea where to find the contacts inside the backup and where to put it in the system?
C.S
Contacts should be stored on the com.android.providers.contacts app (in some Android-specific format inside a SQLite database). I donāt know if copying the /data/data/com.android.providers.contacts/ folder could work, but thatās a bit technical work and can be problematic.
(Edit: Oh, anyway, TWRP backups are dumped partitions in āAndroid sparse imageā formatā¦ you will need to convert them with simg2img before mounting them to extract any content.)
If doing that, make sure file permissions and owner are correct on the new OS. Owner, to my knowledge, should be the UNIX user of the com.android.providers.contacts app. It is u0_a5 on my system, but that could differ from one phone to another. Seems to coincide with the com.android.contacts's owner.
2 Likes
Ok folks, my phone is now in quite good shape again.
Android 6 is running, all my apps are back (not their settings ā¦) and iāve got my contacts and SMS back.
Hereās how i did it:
First, i followed the instructions in the post iāve mentioned above.
So, i installed Version 17.04.0 (phone still in a boot-cycle) and immideatly after that Version 17.06.4.
After that, Android was running stable.
Then, i restored my contacts, SMS and call-log from the TWRP-Backup (which was creatad after the failed update, so thereās hope if your in this situation)
Thereās an incredibly good post here:
https://forum.xda-developers.com/crossdevice-dev/sony/guide-extract-restore-contacts-sms-call-t3259492
Not everything works as explained though, so maybe iāll give some hints here:
1) In the .tar.gz-file, the contacts2.db is located here:
\data\com.android.providers.contacts\databases\
while the mmssms.db is located here:
\data\com.android.providers.telephony\databases\
Also, you can use the search within winrar (or whatever youāre using).
2) The Call Log Backup & Restore App is unessescary, SMS Backup & Restore will do the trick (furthermore, the call log app isnāt available in all countrys vie the play store ā¦)
3) Thereās no need for extra software to convert the .csv (for the contacts). The mentioned Excel-sheet comes with two macros. One to produce a .csv-file and one to convert said file into a .vcf-file
So i hope, this will help you, if your phone doesnāt work after the update.
@Fairphone: If the problem is, that iāve not installed the āfirstā version of Android 6 before the newest update, shouldnāt there be a prompt before the update. Iām not a developer, so maybe thatās not the best idea, but maybe ā¦
Thanks again to everyone who helped me.
Best wishes
C.S.
5 Likes
Hey there,
Iām in Fairphone 2 Open OS on Android 6
I have a big problem today, i boot my phone this morning like every morning and I lost all my contacts
Please help i store all my contacts on the Phoneā¦
Can someone help me ? in French or English
I, too, keep losing my contacts on a daily basisā¦ today even several timesā¦
I can import them from my Sim - well, at least those I stored there - but I donāt understand why this keeps happeningā¦
(Iām using the latest FP Open.)
Last time I managed to import them and merged all duplicates (of which there were tonsā¦) I saved them all as vcf file to make it easier to retrieve them.
Any ideas how to retrieve them permanently would be highly appreciated!
Hello,
I hope my answer will help ! I donāt have this problem, but it seems that post number 15 contains a solution.
Anyway, I suggest you export your contacts to a VCF file (visit card file), preferably on the SD card if you have one, if not, do it on your computer. To do so, open the āContactsā application. In the options (the 3 vertical points on the right top corner), select āImport/Exportā, then āExport to a VCF fileā. Save the file on your SD card or on your computer. If you encounter any contact loss, you can still download them from your VCF file, which wonāt be deleted after the download.
But the loss of contacts is very annoying. To avoid this, you can also switch to Lineage OS, which my FP2 runs and I havenāt had any loss of contacts since. There is a full port (but still not official), with updates. Youāll be on Android 7.1.2. If you wish to do so, go there : LineageOS 14.1 with OTA updates for FP2. You can also look here : #dic:flash. But donāt forget to backup your data with TWRP on the SD card 
Thx @anon59030904, exporting to vcf was what Iāve been doing and now I keep importing it again everytime my contacts are gone. Somehow the phone only keeps my contacts from the Telegram app but loses the rest.
I forgot to mention in my previous post that the loss of contacts didnāt occur right after the updateā¦ Everything was fine at first, but after a week or so, I forbid WhatsApp to use contacts in the settings and later wiped some duplicate files and temp data off my phone. I think thatās when they got lost for the first timeā¦ Itās rather possible that I wiped something crucial by accident along with all the trash - guess thatās what happens if youāre not 100% sure of what youāre doing 
Similar problem here. Not all contacts lost suddenly, but disappearing one by one over last few days. So far Iāve lost at least 10. And in parallel it messed up my Favorites. new contacts have appeared in the favorites screen, which I have definitely not chosen. And old ones are gone 