This is my second smart phone, my first was Sony X10, and I have been saving my contacts wrong the whole time. Any time I added a new contact, and it asked if it was a phone contact or a gmail, I chose phone (made sense to me...). I backed up my contacts anytime I flashed, and restored from sd card. this would, for some reason, save all my Facebook, and Twitter friends also. After reading and figuring out I should have been saving them as gmail contacts I went about doing that... It didn't go so easy for me so I figured I would tell you what I had to do. I'll leave out all the things that didn't work. .
First I opened Contacts and deselected everything except my phone contacts. Then I went through and Deleted all Facebook, and Twitter profiles. Backed up the remaining contacts. Deleted all contacts. Opened Settings / Apps / contacts then clicked clear data. then did the same for contacts import. After that I opened my contacts back up selected import contacts from sd card, then saved them in gmail.
At first I tried just backing up, deleting, then restoring on gmail, but for some reason it would not sync, so I had to clear the data. I hope this help someone out.
Maybe I'm getting too old for technology... haha
Another great thing about synching with gmail is that you can manage all your contacts from your computer. Just go to http://contacts.google.com, and anything you update there automatically updates your phone.
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How the hell do u back your contacts up to Google?? I've searched and I cant find the answers i'm looking for anywhere. Whenever I sync to Google from 'accounts and sync' nothing happens..and now i have successfully deleted all my contacts from my phone after clearing the Contacts app data cache, which i read might help...Luckily i have nandroids to pull the data from.. How exactly do i go about re-flashing the contact data back to the phone from the nandroid, so i can then back em up to Google/export them the the sdcard?? (without restoring the entire nandroid)
Idk if its my ROM or what..but its frustrating..
Go to your gmail account, and click the contacts tab. Do you see any of them there? If not check and make sure that you are saving your contacts to google and not your phone.
Thanks for the quick reply. There's nothing there under the Contacts tab, or any of the sub categories, but how to i check if im syncing them to Google vs the phone?
I cant tell you how to restore your contacts from nandroid, however when you do have them restored go to Settings>Accounts & Sync>Google and make sure you have Sync Contacts checked. This is a 2 way sync so any contacts you have on google will be synced to the phone and the phone to google
Yeah, I've done that as well. It even shows the date when it was last synced..10 min ago, of course i have no contacts to sync now but i'm sure that was working earlier.
I dont know that you can say its not working until you can get those contacts restored, after you do that and sync then lets deal with a non sync issue if there still is one.
I mean I had tried that before I lost the contact data..before I created this thread. The reason i wiped the contacts cache was because sync was not working. I think im just going to do a full nandroid restore anyway and end up installing a different ROM. Any suggestions?
They are automatically backed up when you sync your gmail
As long as u checked back up data with my Google account
This is one thing that I love about Google
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Yeah, the problem is it's not syncing automatically
After flashing my phone to Cyanogen I imported my contacts off of a backup I had on my sd card and then synched to my Google account. Now everyone on the list has two sets of doubled information, one is from my gmail account, the other is in a section called "Phone Only- unsynced"
How can I wipe out all of this extra information and get everyone back to only one set of information?
LordJezo said:
After flashing my phone to Cyanogen I imported my contacts off of a backup I had on my sd card and then synched to my Google account. Now everyone on the list has two sets of doubled information, one is from my gmail account, the other is in a section called "Phone Only- unsynced"
How can I wipe out all of this extra information and get everyone back to only one set of information?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
The easiest way to fix that will be to do it from the computer. Log on to your Gmail account, and navigate to your contacts. Your entire contact list should be up there. If it's not, re sync your contacts from your phone, then check again. Once you see all the contacts, doubles and all, then just use 'mulit select' and just check off one of each that is doubled up, then delete them. Once you re sync again, the problem should be resolved. I believe that *should* work.
In my Gmail contacts list everyone is there and looks good. On my phone I am synched back to Gmail in the past couple of minutes. There is no double info for anyone on my online list, its that there is this other "On Phone" thing and I can't figure out how to get rid of it. I just want my online stuff on my phone. Is there a way to wipe out all my contacts on the phone and then just redownload everything? I tried to delete a contact but that then deleted it off my Gmail account as well.
Okay i figured it out after a little more Googling.
I turned off Google Sync for my contacts. I went into the Manage Applications menu and went to Contacts Storage and cleared out all the data. That wiped out everything on my phone. When I went back into the contacts list it was empty and prompted me to sync up to my gmail account. I did that and everything sorted itself out.
LordJezo said:
In my Gmail contacts list everyone is there and looks good. On my phone I am synched back to Gmail in the past couple of minutes. There is no double info for anyone on my online list, its that there is this other "On Phone" thing and I can't figure out how to get rid of it. I just want my online stuff on my phone. Is there a way to wipe out all my contacts on the phone and then just redownload everything? I tried to delete a contact but that then deleted it off my Gmail account as well.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Hmm. I've never done it, but I would think that if you went into menu>settings>accounts and sync, then clicked on your google account, and Uncheck the 'sync contacts' part. Then try deleting one off your phone, and make sure that it doesn't affect your 'online' contacts from your gmail account. As long as it doesn't delete off your gmail contacts as well, then I'd delete them all off your phone. Then re-check the 'sync contacts' in your accounts and sync. That should then re-sync, and get rid of your doubles. In theory, I believe that should work.
EDIT: Glad you got it figured out. We replied back at the same time, looks like you did just as I was suggesting.
Hi guys,
I seem to have cocked up my contacts through a load of synchronising and messing about.
I now need to delete ALL my phone contacts but NOT the Google contacts (because I want to import the Google contacts after).
The problem is, everytime I delete a phone contact (ie. Have only PHONE visible in contacts list and delete) it also deletes from Google (even though Google is hidden).
This is probably because they're linked contacts... but I have HUNDREDS of linked contacts, also with Facebook etc to show the photos. It took hours setting up all the links and I don't want to break them.
What do I do? :-S I'm really confused.
Thanks
Matt
PS: This came about because I'd accidentally been adding NEW contacts to Google rather than my phone. All I wanted to do was get the 10 extra contacts from Google onto my Phone also (then link them). So i exported the Google contacts to SD card and then imported them to phone from SD Card. It created duplicates on the phone (so now there's 2x more contacts listed in the Phone storage).
Did you try disabling synchronize for google account before deleted action?
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thanks. Tried and it doesn't help. I disabled all synchronisation, unchecked Contacts in the Google account... and it still deleted it.
Re-enabled sync and hoped it would still have a copy on the Google account but it hasn't, it really deleted it.
:-S
But you've the vcf file from your last backup process in your sdcard right?
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yep i just exported google contacts to SD card so I have a copy.
I just want to delete ALL phone contacts and re-import.
When I delete a phone contact though it deletes the Google contact also! And god knows what happens to the Facebook contact (not risking deleting one that's linked to Facebook)
Hej,
When you initailly set up you phone, you setup HTC sync & Google Sync by default. 1. Disable Google Sync, it will delete/not show all the synced google contacts
2. Create a Google Exchange account & sync.
3. Enable linked contacts with facebook (or you can disable facebook sync altogether as I did so as not to have duplicate entries (having mobile number of John twice)
Hope this helps
PJS
thanks for the replies guys.
I've fixed it as follows...
Deleted Facebook account.
Deleted Facebook for HTC Sense account
Deleted all contacts (also from Gmail)
Restarted phone
Imported SD card to Google
Resync'd
Added Facebook accounts
Relinked everything.
What a ball ache! :-S
Thanks again
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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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
Sent from my SPH-D710 using xda premium
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.