restoring contacts after factory reset

[mkdon]

hi

i was temporarily using my old htc desire as i have broken my s3 ( see other threads) and now bought a s6. when i finished using the htc i did a factory reset thinking all my contacts where saved on google account but they were all on my phone. is there any way at all i can get them back?

 

[Crashdamage]

If you had been saving them to your Google (Gmail) account - and I highly recommend you do from now on - you should be able to just resync them to the phone.

If you had been saving them to Google but now they are gone, this would restore them to any point they were at in the last 30 days:

https://support.Google.com/mail/answer/1069522?hi=en

But if you did not save your contacts to Google and did not do manual backups, then sorry, but the contacts are gone.

 

[mkdon]

will no software or apps help? heard alot about fonepaw and something called rooting but wasnt sure if its worth risking

 

[Crashdamage]

There are some apps, DiskDigger, Easeus, Android Recovery, etc. They require rooting the phone. Also, the more the phone has been used since resetting, the poorer the chances of recovery. That's because the chances of the old data - which is actually still there, not erased - being overwritten increase. Then it really is gone.

Anyway, if the data has not been overwritten and if you're willing to root the phone and if you're willing to buy the software, then maybe you can recover the contacts database file. But if I remember right, it's a SQlite file. Not a human-readable text file.

Android since v1.0. Linux since 2001.