Probably one of the most valuable things you can have on your Android device is your list of contacts. Everything from work, friends, family, etc. It’s terrible if all of them go missing at the same time. It doesn’t matter if you have accidentally deleted your contacts, or if they were lost while you were rooting your Android device or doing any other kind of tweaking and tinkering.
In most cases, however, your Android contacts only seem to be deleted or lost when you can’t find them. In this post, I will walk you through the steps how you can recover seemingly lost contacts and how to recover deleted ones.
Sometimes the settings on your Android device can go completely nuts, up until the point where you can’t even find your contacts and think you have lost them all. Before you start freaking out, there is a chance that all your contacts are still on your device, just hidden very carefully. To check if that’s the case, follow these simple steps:
Restoring Android contacts with Gmail
Sidenote: if your contacts are appearing in Gmail but not on your phone, see the steps above and/or try re-syncing your Google accounts completely.
Restore a Nandroid backup (root required)
Check your Android device’s contacts database file (root required)
Depending on your manufacturer and Android version, you will find your database in different locations in your storage. For stock Android devices like the Nexus 5, the database file should be located here:
The key that your are looking for is providers.contacts/databases. To get to this folder straight from your device, install aSQLiteManager, which is able to get into your Android device’s database storage and open .db files.
Well… Now it’s time to blast out a message to all your friends on Facebook, Twitter followers, business contacts and your family, asking them to send you their contact details.