Suddenly contacts disappeared

Help Fairphone 2
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Hey Fairphoners!

Yesterday I discovered that suddenly my contacts disappeared!
For a week now I use the new FP Open OS Update 18.10. - Android 7 - and there are several issues but all my contacts were fine until yesterday. The contacts app just shows about 10 contact entries and when tap on the three dots and tap “shown contacts” it just shows the accounts from davdroid, Signal and Whatsapp. No phone or sim contacts - but I must admit, I dont know where I stored my contacts before. As I reseted my FP four weeks ago I backed up my contacts into a vcf, restored it from this and then installed davdroid to sync the contacts with my nextcloud.
What was also curious: this morning I opened the telephone app and when I searched a name like “Mama” I found it and was able to call it. When I opened it a few minutes later suddenly this was not possible: “Mama” wasnt found, no one was found, and all recent calls were just numbers, no names!
I researched this forum and google but havent found a solution: tried to restore the contacts and contacts storage app via oandbackup - nothing changed.

I apologize in advance for the lack of knowledge. Im still learning! Feel free to ask or command me :smiley:

Edit: restored via oandbackup the contact storage: in the telephone app the numbers were connected to contact information (names) but still no contacts found when I switch here into the contacts section. Also in the contacts app no changes but cannot open it until a phone reboot.

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I had a similar observation today :slightly_frowning_face:. My phone contact list was also fully cleared. Rebooting the phone did not help. I have no clue what causes this problem, but here is how I retrieved the contacts from my last TWRP backup that I did before updating to FP Open 18.10.0 (same as @steviexo):
I found this hint and this script to extract the contacts as VCF from the TWRP backup and basically ended up with this procedure (on Linux):

tar xf <twrp_backup_location>/data.ext4.win000 /data/data/com.android.providers.contacts/databases/contacts2.db
wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/stachre/dump-contacts2db/master/dump-contacts2db.sh
bash dump-contacts2db.sh ./data/data/com.android.providers.contacts/databases/contacts2.db > contacts.vcf

Then I copied the VCF file to my FP2 and imported it with the contacts app. Hope this helps others experiencing similar issues.

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Thanks for posting your solution, this helped me to get my contacts back - and it took only 10 minutes :smiley:

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