Contact syncing with Google just failed

[anon(421311)]

Contact syncing from my HTC Evo 4G to Google has abruptly started to fail.

I just noticed this morning that a contact that I had entered on my phone had failed to sync back to the Google Cloud.

Digging more deeply, I saw an error with that "Syncing temporarily not available." message. I rebooted and synced again.

I am still seeing the last sync marked as 17 July, even when I manually initiate syncing today. All my other Google data sources show as synced today. I briefly see an exclamation mark icon when I manually sync the contacts, but it flashes and disappears. There is now no visible error marking; but I see that the contact sync is not updated as having completed, I see the brief exclamation mark display, and the contact I added on my phone last week is still not in Gmail contacts.

Anyone seen anything like this? Any suggestions?

 

[yodatom10]

Can u remove the Google account from your phone and then re add and re sync

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[anon(421311)]

Can u remove the Google account from your phone and then re add and re sync

Sent from my Xoom using Tapatalk

Suppose I could, but I'm reluctant to do this, since I have at least one (who knows how many?) contacts that are only on the phone. No idea what I'd lose if I was to do that...

 

[yodatom10]

Suppose I could, but I'm reluctant to do this, since I have at least one (who knows how many?) contacts that are only on the phone. No idea what I'd lose if I was to do that...

U could log into your Google account on your computer and type in the new contact right into Google. And then remove the account is this your primary Google account?

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[anon(421311)]

U could log into your Google account on your computer and type in the new contact right into Google. And then remove the account is this your primary Google account?

Sent from my Xoom using Tapatalk

The problem with that is that there is no "diff" program to tell me what contacts are on my phone and not on Google already. I know of one for sure, but I don't have any way of telling how many others there might be, or what modifications I have made to contacts on my phone that have not been propagated to Google.

One of the worst things about this problem is that the phone does nothing to warn you that the sync is failing. You only find out if you drill into the sync settings, and even then only if you notice the last sync date is old. That means that by the time you notice that something has gone wrong, it is very difficult to tell how much is not being synced.

This is a really, really bad failure mode, and IMO a terrible piece of user-interface engineering.

:'(

 

[Biggnaa20]

Suppose I could, but I'm reluctant to do this, since I have at least one (who knows how many?) contacts that are only on the phone. No idea what I'd lose if I was to do that...

You can export your contacts to a .vcf file (go into the "people" app and find the export option in the menu). Then you should have a back up in case anything goes wrong.

 

[yodatom10]

You can export your contacts to a .vcf file (go into the "people" app and find the export option in the menu). Then you should have a back up in case anything goes wrong.

very true i would do that and then remove the google account. if its the only google account on the phone you will have to do a factory reset to get rid of it.

 

[anon(421311)]

Are you sure I need to do a factory reset to get rid of it? I was having trouble with my calendar syncing before and I just turned of calendar syncing, removed the local cache, and then restored calendar syncing, and it came back.

I'd have to do the .vcf import somehow in that process, but do you all think that would be enough to get the sync working again?

 

[rambo47]

I've recently had sporadic trouble syncing contacts through Google (set to sync automatically) but it's straightened itself out. Perhaps Google was having some internal issues.

In any event, try simply restarting your Evo. Sometimes a reboot sorts out minor glitches.

 

[Citizen Coyote]

I had this happen to me once and this is what I did to fix it. First, as others have said, back up your contacts to your SD card. It's also a good idea to put those phone-only contacts into Google as well. Next, open Menu > Settings > Applications > Storage Use and look for Contacts Storage. Open it and click on Clear data. Then reboot your phone and perform a manual sync to pull your contacts back in from Google ( which is why I recommend putting all your contacts into Google; otherwise just import the backup file from your SD card).

That should fix the problem. It happens when the contacts storage file gets corrupted and Google sync can't mstch it to what's on the server.