"clear data" to clear storage room, realised i lost all my contacts, how do i find them ?

[Android Central Question]

every few months i upload all my photos and video to the computer ,
when i do that, as a backup , i copy EVERY FOLDER FROM MY PHONE to the computer.
and date them.

now that im looking for the data/data/com.android.providers.contacts/databases/contacts.2d
cant find this when i search bar my computer, and cant find a contacts folder.

also, it seems that my gmail , even though always logged in on my phone, hasnt saved my contacts, even tho contacts sync was on, iv never bothered to turn off things.

im not super tech/phone savy.

do i need to face it that i deleted all my contacts by 'clear data"?
or are my contacts hiding in between folders and files that i had backed up every time that i saved all my photos and videos to the computer?

 

[B. Diddy]

Re: "clear data" to clear storage room, realised i lost all my contacts, how do i find them ?

Welcome to Android Central! If all of your contacts were entered into your phone in the Phone Account and not your Google account, then they were all saved locally on the phone and not synced or backed up anywhere automatically. If you cleared data from the Contact Storage system app, then they're gone -- sorry! This data isn't saved in a user-accessible folder. It's saved in an SQLite database file in a protected system directory.

In the future, I strongly recommend making sure all contacts are saved to your Google account, not the local Phone account. Contacts saved to your Google account will automatically sync to your Google Contacts in the cloud, so you never have to worry about this.