Contact Storage - Size Issue!

[Legobricke]

Ok...

Currently, my contact storage (445 Meg) is causing issues in other app's that use the contact storage due to it's size.

I only have 450 contacts, so this size it crazy....

What can I do to fix this issue?

Lego

 

[B. Diddy]

Does each contact have a lot of notes or attachments?

 

[Legobricke]

No.... No notes on any of them....

I just checked my old phone which still has the contacts on it and that file is only 32 mb....

Just wondering why the file on my new phone is 400+.

Any ideas on how to get the file down to it's proper size?

 

[Fathertime]

Do you have duplicates?

 

[B. Diddy]

That's a good question. Also, are these contacts locally stored to the Phone account, or are they all synced from your Google account? If they're all in your Google Contacts in the cloud, then you could try Clear Cache/Clear Data from the Contacts app and the Contacts Storage app. Then let Google re-sync your contacts, and see if it still ends up that big.

If all of your contacts are saved locally, then do not Clear Data, because you'll lose all of the contacts.

 

[Crashdamage]

Do a .vcf file export of all the contacts on the phone first. You don't want to risk losing contacts that exist only on the phone, that are not saved VB to Google. That file, if it's not loaded with over 400MB of trash, should be only a few MB. Save it for importing to Google and for backup.

Then check your Google contacts online (if you have any saved there). IF that looks OK (or empty) and IF the .vcf file you saved seems to be a reasonably small size, THEN import the .vcf file to your Google contacts. Do a Find duplicates and merge.

Then delete all the contacts in the phone so it can start over clean. Resync the cleaned-up list from Google and you should be good.

Android since v1.0. Linux since 2001

 

[NotFromHere]

I've just dealt with this same issue, and I don't think the size of the Contacts Storage app/file has anything to do with how many contacts you have, deleting duplicates, etc. I think it's a function of having had an Android phone and a Google Contacts account for a long time, and that file just gets bigger & bigger.

I started having major trouble with Hangouts that I simply couldn't fix until I found a tip on the Google Product Forums sites that fixed it. The tip was to clear cache and clear data in the Contacts Storage App within Settings. After I did this all of my contacts were deleted from my phone, and then they all re-appeared after my google account re-sync'd everything, which happened automatically.

I should mention that I make a point of saving all of my contacts within my Google account, not with Verizon's Backup Assistant or any of the other options that come up when you make a new contact. This meant that all I had to do was re-sync all of that contact data. I lost nothing.

After I did this my Contacts Storage went from something like 380 mb down to just under 20 mb, and everything on the phone has worked much more smoothly since, including the fact that it fixed the problem with Hangouts, which simply quit working all of a sudden and would barely function until I followed these steps.

Oh, and my phone is a Droid Maxx running KitKat.