After factory restore I lost all my contacts on my S6. Why?

[AC Question]

I just switched to an android phone from an iPhone for the first time. I went to the att store where they transferred my contacts over to the S6. 2 days later I tried to install an ios emulator to download an app not available on android that I used to use. The emulator turned out to do nothing and I felt like I just installed malware so I look into restoring the phone to a previous point. To my surprise there is no option to do this but factory restore and then back up from your google account. I do this thinking I'll be fine because I turned on the setting to back up my phone to the google account. I do the reset and discover that I only get one restore point and it doesn't mention from what time; just says "last used today". I do the restore even though its probably not far back enough to erase the damage the emulator download did and discover that I have lost all my contacts. WHAT THE ****! Whats the point of the backup if it doesn't backup the single most important thing: your contacts! Whats the point of backup if you can't restore to multiple points! Feeling really frustrated with this phone right now. Do I need to go back to ATT with my old iphone to get my contacts back again?

 

[B. Diddy]

Welcome to Android Central! When you transfer your contacts like that, they get saved to the local Phone account, which doesn't backup or sync automatically to anything. You would have had to initiate the backup yourself, using something like Samsung Smart Switch. Google's sync only syncs your Google account's contacts with your Google Contacts in the cloud, not the locally saved Phone account contacts. In my opinion, the most convenient and safest way to manage your contacts is to have them all saved to your Google account, because then they sync automatically with your Google Contacts in the cloud.