Lost phone contacts not synched?

[Milzee]

I've just spent the morning trying to get my S10 back to how it was last night after uninstalling and reinstalling several apps because of the Android System Webview bug. I was uninstalling and reinstalling all the apps that were crashing, before I found out about the bug, thinking one of them was affecting all the others and trying to find the culprit.

As a result I lost all my contacts. That has happened before. I use Outlook as my primary email. After reenabling synch contacts with my Outlook account most of my contacts have come back but all the contacts I've entered since I bought the phone a year ago are still missing.

It looks like the phone was saving them somewhere else but where? I checked the default location in the contacts app and it wasn't set. I have since set it to my Outlook account. I have a Gmail account which I only set up to register the phone but don't use it for anything else. I tried synching contacts with that but that email has no contacts saved against it. There is nothing on the SIM and only one contact on the phone (looks like it came from a banking app).

I have the phone set up to backup to google drive (on the above mentioned Gmail account) but I can't find any way to restore it. When I try to use the Samsung restore facility it just tries to set up a Samsung account. I've never had a Samsung account and don't see how setting one up will help me restore off google drive.

Any ideas on where my missing contacts have gone and how I might get them back?

 

[DonB]

Read the below, probably the culprit, if you update your Android Webview, it should all be good and back to normal.

https://androidforums.com/threads/apps-closing-for-no-reason.1334521

I've just spent the morning trying to get my S10 back to how it was last night after uninstalling and reinstalling several apps because of the Android System Webview bug. I was uninstalling and reinstalling all the apps that were crashing, before I found out about the bug, thinking one of them was affecting all the others and trying to find the culprit.

As a result I lost all my contacts. That has happened before. I use Outlook as my primary email. After reenabling synch contacts with my Outlook account most of my contacts have come back but all the contacts I've entered since I bought the phone a year ago are still missing.

It looks like the phone was saving them somewhere else but where? I checked the default location in the contacts app and it wasn't set. I have since set it to my Outlook account. I have a Gmail account which I only set up to register the phone but don't use it for anything else. I tried synching contacts with that but that email has no contacts saved against it. There is nothing on the SIM and only one contact on the phone (looks like it came from a banking app).

I have the phone set up to backup to google drive (on the above mentioned Gmail account) but I can't find any way to restore it. When I try to use the Samsung restore facility it just tries to set up a Samsung account. I've never had a Samsung account and don't see how setting one up will help me restore off google drive.

Any ideas on where my missing contacts have gone and how I might get them back?

 

[Milzee]

Thanks, I already uninstalled Android WebView and the apps aren't crashing any more. The question is how to get the contacts back. I don't think reinstalling WebView will do that?

 

[mikedt]

Yeh, AF seems to have had many posts about this Google webview problem. Although I've not seen it myself. Of course any updates I receive on my phone doesn't come from Google.

If your missing contacts weren't backed-up or synced with anything, like Google or other backup etc. and they're gone from your phone, quite frankly I don't think you can get them back. .

 

[Milzee]

Thanks, what about restoring the google drive back up? Wouldn't local contacts on the phone be in there? Any ideas on how to do that?

 

[ocnbrze]

Thanks, what about restoring the google drive back up? Wouldn't local contacts on the phone be in there? Any ideas on how to do that?

if you did not save your contacts via google then those contacts are gone. not sure where they are saved at, but it is most likely within the system partition where you do not have access to. always use google to enter your contacts and never phone......phone will enter the info locally only.

 

[mikedt]

Thanks, what about restoring the google drive back up? Wouldn't local contacts on the phone be in there? Any ideas on how to do that?

Did you sync your contacts with Google? Your OP only refers to syncing with Outlook accounts?

 

[Hadron]

I don't know precisely what you have set to back up to Google or how you did it, but perhaps this article will be helpful: https://support.google.com/android/answer/2819582?hl=en.

I'll note that it only talks about restoring after a reset. If that is the only option (I've only glanced through it) I'd make sure you have your own backup of everything of importance first (and not tell it to take a fresh backup the same way, in case it overwrites something). I might add that I don't like trusting Google to do backups so have never relied on or used this system, others may be able to advise better on this.

But I'm surprised that uninstalling apps could do this, because the app that actually stores the contacts, the rather obviously-named "Contacts Storage" app, is one I'd not expect you to be able to uninstall and also not one I'd expect to be affected by a webview problem. Do you know what apps you did uninstall? I'm hoping there is some way to make your phone's contacts app resync with a local contacts database, but don't know the S10's contacts app at all (my Pixel has the Google one, which flat out does not support contacts that aren't linked to an account - Google clearly don't want people to think it's OK to have data and not share it with the corporations!).

 

[Milzee]

Did you sync your contacts with Google? Your OP only refers to syncing with Outlook accounts?

No, only to Outlook, but none of the new contacts are in Outlook so it looks like any new contacts were saved to the phone. I don't see why they should have been deleted though. I didn't uninstall the contacts app. Only Outlook and Samsung email.

 

[Milzee]

I don't know precisely what you have set to back up to Google or how you did it, but perhaps this article will be helpful: https://support.google.com/android/answer/2819582?hl=en.

Thanks, I'll give it a read. The backup app in settings allows you to specify which cloud service you backup to. It defaults to Samsung Cloud. I changed it to Google Drive.

I would have preferred OneDrive which is my main cloud provider because it's tied in with my Outlook and Office365 accounts but you can't select it. So I already had two cloud providers with Outlook and Google and wasn't about to set up a 3rd with Samsung.

The problem is it doesn't tell you much about the restore process. It seems to be aimed at synching data to a new phone rather than a recovery back up like you would have on a PC.

 

[Hadron]

Yeah, the problem there is that the backup app in the Settings of your Samsung phone is a Samsung backup app. That's why it only talks to a Samsung account.

I do have one (old, semi-retired) Samsung device, but I never created a Samsung account, so I'm afraid I have no experience of this system.