Root XTRSense and the case of Disappearing Contacts

[greenmunky]

So yesterday I flashed XTRSense4.0.6.1 to both mine and my wife's Eris. My phone has been running great with no problems whatsoever. This afternoon my wife calls me freaking out because her contacts have disappeared... all of them. She said they were all there this morning and all of a sudden they're just gone. I told her to go to Settings, Accounts/Sync, and to Sync Google but that didn't help. She rebooted her phone, synced again and still nothing. Finally I walked her through the process of rebooting into recovery mode, wiping cache, doing a factory reset, and finally a NAND restore which got her back to pre-XTRSense and all her contacts came back without issue. What could have caused this issue and what can I do to prevent future occurrences? I'd really like to flash XTRSense back to her phone because it seemed to fix her other issues but not if its going to cause more problems than it fixes. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

 

[WormDoes]

Huh, that's strange. I was just about to go through the motions and flash xtraSense, glad I stumbled on your thread first. I hope you can get your issue resolved. I've heard it's a great ROM. Have you tried going over to XDA and asking zach.xtr about it?? xtraSense is his creation

 

[Praetorian]

I've been using the new version for awhile now but I haven't seen my contacts disappear. Is she using local phone contacts or are they stored on google? (mine are stored on google).

 

[erisuser1]

I've been using xtrSENSE 4.0.6.1 for a couple of days now, and haven't had such an occurrence. I'll come back here and post if I have similar troubles.

(I'd been using Froyo ROMs for a while, and wanted to see what the hubub was about - I've been running it without SetCPU, and it seems really smooth and fast so far).

Since the problem phone got "wiped" all the crime scene evidence is gone - so the only thing left that can be done is speculation.

I never had contacts disappear en masse, but on one ROM (can't remember which), I had a contact synchronization problem that caused only a fraction of my contacts to be present on the phone.

In that case, using

Settings -> Applications -> Manage applications -> Contacts Storage -> Clear data

followed by a sync operation solved the problem. (Sorry, I can't remember if I rebooted and did the sync, or just the sync).

I had looked at the log during booting of the phone ("adb logcat"), and it was clear that there was some sort of corruption or crash that was occurring that had something to do with the contacts database, so that's why I tried the "Clear data" operation mentioned above.

Sometimes you can get a good hunch at what is going on by looking through the logcat output - although wading through all those messages is a bit like searching through a field of thistles for one particular kind of thistle - you don't recognize nor understand the vast majority of what you are looking at.

The other practical advice that might be worth considering is this: take a Nandroid Backup of your new ROM right after you are done configuring it. That way, if there is trouble down the road - especially of the "corruption" type, you can restore the same ROM from an earlier time, rather than restoring a Nand backup of a different ROM.

Given the circumstances - a panic'ed user at a remote location, you did the right thing (but having a backup of xtrSENSE4.0.6.1 already on the phone would have been a tiny bit better).

eu1

 

[WormDoes]

While on the topic of contacts..when flashing new ROM's I'm assuming all your contacts do switch over? I'm gona to flash xtrSENSE in a bit but this thread got me thinking. I don't have any of my contacts saved through google, will I run into an issue flashing this? This may be a very simple, stupid, question but I'm a first time ROM flasher so I just want to make sure

 

[erisuser1]

While on the topic of contacts..when flashing new ROM's I'm assuming all your contacts do switch over? I'm gona to flash xtrSENSE in a bit but this thread got me thinking. I don't have any of my contacts saved through google, will I run into an issue flashing this? This may be a very simple, stupid, question but I'm a first time ROM flasher so I just want to make sure

Don't assume that.

Any contact that is not a Gmail contact will be lost if you do not take steps to back them up.

You can log on to your Gmail account using a computer to check what contacts are in "the cloud".

Just be sure that you make a Nandroid backup - if something goes wrong with your export/import of non-Gmail contacts, you will be able to roll back and try something else.

eu1

 

[greenmunky]

Well ever since the NAND restore my wife's phone has been fine. Contacts remain in place, as they should, and no other hiccups. I'm still running XTRSense without issue... except for the fact that it seemed to drain my battery really fast yesterday. I'm overclocked to 768 rather than the 710 default but that's how I had SetCPU set before I flashed to XTRSense (my wife and I were both running stock 2.1, rooted with Engtools3 and overclocked... and my battery life was fine then). I think I read somewhere that if you boot into recovery mode -> wipe -> wipe battery usage statistics or something to that effect that it can significantly improve your battery life... any truth to that? Also, what does wiping the Dalvik cache do? Its something I've done before wiping the phone's internal memory prior to flashing a ROM, but is it something that can be done as part of regular memory maintenance rather than clearing individual apps cache? Again, any help will be much appreciated.

 

[WormDoes]

Don't assume that.

You can log on to your Gmail account using a computer to check what contacts are in "the cloud".

eu1

I flashed xtrSENSE last night and long story short ended up losing my nandroid backups and was stuck with a factory reset phone(Somehow my SD card didn't backup on my comp...very odd). I had all my contatcs backuped up on "Backup Assistant" from my old BlackBerry but you can't access the BA from an Eris. I had to bring the old BB to VZW and have them switch my contacts over. Needless to say I made sure all my contatcs are backed up on gmail now.

 

[erisuser1]

I think I read somewhere that if you boot into recovery mode -> wipe -> wipe battery usage statistics or something to that effect that it can significantly improve your battery life... any truth to that?

To first order, it does nothing to improve battery life. All it can do is improve how well the phone predicts how much charge remains on the battery.

If you invoke 2nd-order considerations, such as, "well, I step down my setCPU profiles as the battery reserve drops, so if the battery reserve is predicted correctly, rather than over-optimistically, I will extend the battery life a little" - then, yes, there are some 2nd-order benefits of doing a calibration procedure.

Also, what does wiping the Dalvik cache do? Its something I've done before wiping the phone's internal memory prior to flashing a ROM, but is it something that can be done as part of regular memory maintenance rather than clearing individual apps cache? Again, any help will be much appreciated.

If you are doing a "Wipe data/factory reset", then (also) performing a Dalvik cache wipe is completely superfluous, as the Dalvik cache is just a folder inside the /data partition. If you nuke /data, you also nuke the Dalvik cache.

The primary motivation for wiping the Dalvik cache is a pretty limited scenario: generally only when you want to do an overlay flash of a new ROM. In this case the /data partition is not wiped because you want to preserve application settings and data on the phone, but want to be absolutely sure that the "dex"'ed code in the Dalvik cache actually matches (potentially updated) code in apps (.apk files) stored in the new ROM's /system partition.

Doing a Dalvik cache wipe as part of a regular maintenance procedure on an unchanged ROM has very little value, unless you have some reason to enjoy slow booting - or perhaps if your phone experienced a crash or some other strange malfunction during booting and startup, and you have reason to believe that an app's corresponding "dex" in the Dalvik cache has been corrupted.

eu1

 

[erisuser1]

I flashed xtrSENSE last night and long story short ended up losing my nandroid backups and was stuck with a factory reset phone(Somehow my SD card didn't backup on my comp...very odd). I had all my contatcs backuped up on "Backup Assistant" from my old BlackBerry but you can't access the BA from an Eris. I had to bring the old BB to VZW and have them switch my contacts over. Needless to say I made sure all my contatcs are backed up on gmail now.

Flashing of a ROM never writes to the SD card - it only reads from it. Extremely unlikely that the act of flashing the ROM had anything at all to do with your loss of SD card data.

If you are making a backup of a fairly full or even half-full 8GB SD card across a USB 2.0 link to your PC, the file copying operation alone will take 15-30 minutes. I would think that failure to copy would be immediately noticeable - as it would finish nearly instantly.

I think I used Backup Assistant 9 or 10 months ago, but the method I used there was to export the contacts from my accounts' login page (on verizon.net? ... I forget now), and then use that file to load contacts into Gmail using the PC. Can't remember if I needed to load the csv into Excel and cut out columns or not.

eu1

 

[WormDoes]

I wasn't suggesting that the ROM had anything to do with the SD card not copying. I don't know what happened to be honest. It took about 20 minutes to copy to my laptop and when I went to import the file back onto my SD card it was empty.