When I got up this morning, over 90% of my contact list was gone, but the contacts missing don’t follow much of a pattern.
This happened a couple of days after installing Whatsapp only to find that the EFF’s guidelines on it are no longer accurate, in that you can no longer add contacts manually. Either you must give WA access to your whole address book for them to pass on to FB, or you can’t start a chat. I opted not to give it any permissions and haven’t used it since.
This is also several days after updating FPOpen to 18.02.0
When I got my Fairphone 2, I first transferred most of my old cameraphone’s contact list via SIM card (all the names of which got butchered by the transfer process for some reason), then added plenty more contacts in the couple of years since then.
Of the 20 or so remaining, most are contacts that I have added in the last few months, and a few Signal contacts.
Also notably, the “ME” contact at the top of the list is now blank, saying “Set up my profile” in the space where before I had my own phone number. So, my best guess is that some kind of offline account was deleted, since I don’t have any Google account set up, or something to do with the phone/SIM itself was somehow un-linked, or a blank profile was over-written…
Under the “Contacts to display” menu I have “All Contacts” selected. Signal and Linphone contacts are set to sync, and Whatsapp ones are not.
I have tried rebooting and that didn’t achieve anything. The next possible actions that I can see could be to uninstall Whatsapp, or to update to 18.03.1
I could also try and see if I can import old contacts via SIM again, as I still have the old cameraphone (and was soon going to send it to be recycled thanks to FP’s prompt!) but that would still leave me with a gap of over a year’s contacts and updates to phone numbers to put in.
If there is any way of recovering my contact list to the way it was a few days ago, then I want to do that, and I don’t want to take an action that could stop me doing that afterwards, otherwise I’ll be here for ages looking up and manually adding them again, if I even remembered to put them all on my pc.
Thanks, do you know if there’s an open-source equivalent to MPE? I haven’t found one yet.
After a bit of searching around on this forum and others, I read that contacts could still be recoverable from this root directory:
/data/data/com.android.providers.contacts/databases
which was also mentioned in the discussion that you linked to.
However, I’ve had both trouble with my FP2 not showing up on listed devices when I tried to access it via ADB over USB with these instructions, and when I browsed to it within the FP2 itself using Ghost Commander and tried to copy the file with that, the device froze then restarted about a minute later. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I tried again this time enabling the misc/advanced preference “Ignore permission errors on copy/move” and got the files contacts2.db, contacts2.db-journal and profile.db to look through and see whether there is anything to save.
…just connected to the phone and those last two files aren’t present over USB even though they appeared to have been copied on the aforementioned GC file manager. Now I need to find software to open it with, since a text editor won’t do it.
I installed sqlitebrowser and looked at the table raw_contacts to find that only my current contacts were stored in this database. Any hope of the previous list being rescued appears lost as that was the largest file in that directory, so I’m going to just copy the out of date contacts over from old SIM ones again and sit wondering if this will happen again in future.
