Develop Bugs

Backing Up Contacts... Sim Card?

I've been looking around for a long time in searching this site and other forum sites and no one really had the answer i was looking for, so im only wondering about this. Since we've all been rooted, i decided to install a ROM, and when i finally had it booted and everything, i was prompted to put my google account in to sync my contacts. But they didnt show up? Now mind you, i only have 1 google account, and that is the one i created at verizon when i asked for the DI2. Im currently on the Stock right now with all my data. in Settings >Account & Sync, i have the backup assistant, facebook, the google account, mail news and twitter. In the muiu ROM, i put that google account in but never got my contacts back. So my question is, are there other ways of backing up your contacts without erasing them to your SD card, OR SIM CARD? when i go to export contacts, it wants to save it as a file in my SD card, and then when i import them on another rom, it asks for a Vcard, but it doesnt work? Can anyone explain this to me?

Sync the contacts to your google account. I believe it asks you when adding a contact if you want them as a google contact or phone only. Make sure you select google contact. Then check the "sync contacts" box under your google account sync settings (its checked by default, but I uncheck it once its done to save battery life. Don't know if you do the same). Then force a resync of contacts before you change roms to make sure no new contacts or info are left out. From there change to any rom, or any other android phone and your contacts will be restored on the initial sign in.
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yeah i see what your saying. In the people app, when i click menu, and then view contacts, it says with Facebook fot HTC Sense, i have 538 contacts, my Google account has 4, and the Phone has 179. How to save all the phone contacts to my google account?

Not sure myself. Never tried it and I dont know if you can change a phone contact to a google contact once the info has already been put in. Try GO contacts from the market? Lets you back up all your contacts. Haven't tried it but I've backed up and restored texts with GO SMS from the same developer, and it worked great. Im assuming it would work just as well.
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tried it, and it worked just as i expected. Huge thanks, you saved me a LOT of time! and big ups on that SMS backup app, it did wonders. much appreciation

Glad I could help
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[Q] Question regarding which ROM to install & Backing Up Contacts

1: I've been running an ICS theme on my epic 4g touch for a little while and I'm looking into installing a ROM to improve speed and battery life. I've been struggling to choose between the most current version of Blazer, or Unnamed. They seem relatively similar apart from the fact that if I get Unnamed I'll have to flash an ICS theme over it, but I'd like opinions from everyone.
2: I understand for both of those ROMs you must wipe your phone. I have no issue with wiping apps as they can be reinstalled, but I need my contacts. I don't have an SD card and would prefer to not have to buy one, so is there any method to backing up my contacts that I could retrieve them post flashing?
Thanks in advance

1. I don't have either of those so can't help with that.
2. if you have a Gmail account set up you can back up contacts. its in accounts and sync under settings. just be sure to go online into your Gmail account to check. I thought I was backed up before and wasn't.

patrao_n said:
1. I don't have either of those so can't help with that.
2. if you have a Gmail account set up you can back up contacts. its in accounts and sync under settings. just be sure to go online into your Gmail account to check. I thought I was backed up before and wasn't.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I've tried syncing the contacts to gmail before but when I checked the account, none of my contacts were there.

ya I believe I fixed it by going to accounts and sync. then clicked on the google account. unchecked all. then checked only contacts and hit sync now. if that doesn't work try removing account and then add it again. sorry I don't know of any third party way to backup the contacts.

The trick is to get all of your email contacts into Gmail on your PC even if you have to manually enter each one. Then they will sync automatically to your phone and you won't have to back anything up. If you use Outlook on your computer, I think there's a way to export your contacts into gmail with a csv file. I couldn't tell you how to do it but you should be able to find out by searching in Google forums. I did mine all manually when I first started using android and I've never had to back up anything. Google does it for me. I know this will sound really strange, but to get them all to sync to Gmail and into my phone contacts list, I had to enter a fake email address for the contacts I only had a phone number for. Now I can flash and wipe my phone all I want and all my email and phone contacts sync again as soon as my phone connects to Google servers. I have them stored on my sd card, too, but I never need to restore them from it. Make sure you have two way sync turned on in your Gmail account on your computer. If you want gmail to pull in all of your other email accounts such as Comcast or hotmail, you can set that up on your computer too in Gmail account settings. I get all my mail in Gmail now and don't even use the other email client on my phone.

When you create a contact it will give you 2 options. 1 to backup internal 2 to backup to Google. It seems you selected internal so you need to go to contacts and go through the menus until you switch all contacts to Google then do your sync through settings. Best of luck if your still having issues do a titanium backup.. but like the poster said above as long as you save your contacts to Google in the future it makes going from rom to rom a breeze
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Sweet, thanks everyone. I've got my contacts onto Gmail. Anyone have opinions regarding Unnamed vs. Blazer?

There's also a way to backup manually your contact list. In contacts program hit menu then export. It saves the file as 00001.icf in the root of your sd card. After you export, use a file manager to go and make sure the file is there before proceeding. You could then copy it to your computer or email it as an attachment to yourself.
Or it could be .vcf I forgot

Cleaning up contacts?

ok - so I get that if I sync my Google contacts to my phone, I sometimes see a name or email address to someone I don't have saved as a contact. i.e. I put in a text and then put in a name and as I started typing the name, Steve, I saw the name of someone I emailed last year about some skis, Sam. I love how Google never forgets and saves names, numbers and emails of people you'll never contact again.
Anyhow, I cleaned up all my contacts and want to export them to my SD so that if I flash a new ROM I don't have to worry about losing my contacts. Some of my contacts don't have gmail/email/facebook, just names and numbers. I've done this in the past and when I import the contacts from my SD card - it ends up doubling or tripling up names in the contact list - all un-joined.
How can I export a clean list to the SD and import it back without creating 200 additional duplicate contacts?

Just clean and deal with your contacts from the Gmail site. Keeps things a lot simpler.
Epic 4G Touch perfected by Tiff and Calk!

I ran into the same issue myself. what I did was, cleaned up the contacts on my phone, export it to my SD card (it saves as a 0001.vcf file, but you can rename it if you want).
I was going to flash a custom ROM, so I wiped everything. And since you are flashing a new ROM yourself, its usually better to do a full wipe anyway. Once I got my phone up and running, I disabled sync contacts with my google account and made sure my contact list was empty. Then I just imported my saved contacts.
I backed up my SMS messages with SMS backup the same way, available for free in the market.

If you go into contacts you can hit menu while in contacts and set it to
show only contacts with a phone number or such
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I had this issue as well when i first came to the Droid world. I had all these weird contacts showing up when I would search a name for a text or what have you. Found out that I had Google set to save contacts I once had and deleted or even any email addresses that I had ever sent to. I went to contacts on gmail and cleaned everything out and set gmail settings to not save the emails anymore. Not sure if this will help you or not but I thought I would share.

There is an app on the market that will scan and fix duplicates, merge contacts, and other things. I forget the name but just search for "contact cleaner" and it should show up.

[Q] How can i fix my Contact in my Galaxy S3

hi, this is recently happen to my Samsung Galaxy S3. earlier i import my contact from my black berry through google sync, then i use it for a couple months and my GS3 become very slow (after installing a lots of apps). after that i decide to reset my GS3 to the factory setting, then i installed the apps that i need and try to import my contact from my blackberry again. but this time i use transfer contact through Bluetooth.
this is where the problem begin... in my contact there is an additional sub labeled "#" and 1 of my friend whose start with alphabetical A get in to that sub. i attach the screen shoot of what happened, please some one help me and tell me how to fix this.

Just write down his number, delete from contacts, and then re add
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when i did that, it will be replace by the next one... in other words i need to re type all contact....

Perhaps the GS3 is not reading the data from the Blackberry correctly due to how it's stored or something on that phone. Try importing the BB contacts to some other medium first: i.e., GMAIL, YAHOO MAIL, etc. Then try exporting from email to the GS3 and see if that helps. My GS3 imports flawlessly from GMAIL, and it seems to sync well with installed apps for these mediums.

You could also export to excel and then import to android. Sometimes the fields are different and result in what you have.

at the first time i use google sync and i went ok, but this time i couldn't find google sync for blackberry anymore... i'll try to import my contact using excel...

After moving from Blackberry to Android, I opted to store all my contacts in my Gmail account. This way, regardless of what phone I have, I will always have a backup/sync. Another good option if you don't like the idea of cloud storage of your contacts is Outlook. No, its not free, but it does a great job of contact management and exporting.

Sync Device Contacts To Google?

New question: How do I sync contacts stored on the device to Google? When creating a brand new contact on the phone it asks where you want to save it, but for contacts that are imported via Bluetooth you have no choice as to where they are saved. Thus, I have contacts on the device I want uploaded to Google and can't figure out how to do that.
--Original Post--
Ok, this is a silly question. I have a second S4 which is for work. I have a gmail account specifically for that device (Google Apps corporate stuff as seen HERE), it syncs with my office outlook, etc. That said, I have a number of contacts on my personal S4 which I had been using until I got the company S4 which I want to now send to the work S4 so I can delete them from my personal S4.
Now then, what I want to happen is to be able to send the contact, have it upload to Google, and be done (thus also syncing with my Outlook in my office, etc). What I tried was to open contacts, menu/import/export/share namecard via/Bluetooth and sent them via Bluetooth. That worked, they show up in my contact list just fine, and they are stored on the device. Problem is, they don't seem to upload to Google.
Once (if?) they do, I want to be able to delete them from the device so they are ONLY stored on Google. Will deleting them from the device also delete them from Google again? How would I resolve this conflict if so? I don't want to sit and manually type all these contacts out into Google via web browser (or the phone) to have them sync down to the phone. One would think there would be another way...
Silly questions, I know. But hey, maybe someone has done this before.

I don't exactly remember where it is but if you're using the stock rom if you go to settings (don't know where it really is) there's some feature that allow you to do that, contacts msgs etc.. Its not group play but it's similar to it.. If you're using the stock rom then look for it kuz that's one of the things I first saw when I got the s4...
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Ok, so I ended up just sending all the contacts via Bluetooth since I needed them. That works fine, however they still haven't uploaded to Google. Web searching reveals lots of people with this issue.
New question: How do you force sync contacts stored on the device to Google?

02CWRX said:
Ok, so I ended up just sending all the contacts via Bluetooth since I needed them. That works fine, however they still haven't uploaded to Google. Web searching reveals lots of people with this issue.
New question: How do you force sync contacts stored on the device to Google?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Settings->Accounts->Google->your account->Sync now should work.

It doesn't.

To the top, still looking for an answer here.

Try this
Select all the contacts that's on device and export it to sd card.
Now chose import from sd card and select which gmail account to import to.
The phone will scan the sd card and should pick up the file you exported earlier.
Edit: I just make up a bunch of contacts and save it to my device. Did the export to sd and import to my gmail account and it sync.

baseballfanz said:
Try this
Select all the contacts that's on device and export it to sd card.
Now chose import from sd card and select which gmail account to import to.
The phone will scan the sd card and should pick up the file you exported earlier.
Edit: I just make up a bunch of contacts and save it to my device. Did the export to sd and import to my gmail account and it sync.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
You're a genius. Since this is a work phone and didn't come with one, I had no SD card in it and obviously didn't want to spend my own money on one for it, thus the export to SD wasn't an option listed. I took the old SD card from my Sensation 4G, did as you suggested, and it worked. Thanks so much!
The only downside was that since I had so many contacts, I got a couple errors that I was trying to do too many at once. Hopefully it all panned out, I will be able to check Monday at the office. I am hoping the new contacts added here will sync down to my Outlook at work, but I think they will.
Thanks again!
EDIT: Everything worked fine. Thanks again!