Question Deleted duplicate contacts, now both copies are gone. Any way to get them back?

[buckythewonderhorse]

My wife has a cheap Android phone (Telstra branded, Blade A5 2020-T, Android version 9). For some unknown reason, for the last few weeks many names were duplicated in her Contacts list. So today she went through and deleted the duplicates. But when she went back to Contacts, both copies had been deleted! So she has lost a dozen or so contacts. Is there any way to get them back?

A couple of other points:

• A number of web pages say to enter Contacts, click the left hand side button, and find the Recycle bin. But on this phone, there is no Recycle bin there.
• System says that "Cloud backup" is on, but we can't find anything under her Google account. But maybe we are not looking in the right place.

 

[belodion]

Welcome.

Have you tried contacts.google.com?

 

[buckythewonderhorse]

Welcome.

Have you tried contacts.google.com?

Yes. It has lots of email contacts, but no phone numbers.

 

[buckythewonderhorse]

We have noticed that the numbers are still there in her SMS and phone call history, so we will be able to deduce most of them. It's still annoying though!

 

[B. Diddy]

Welcome to Android Central! Contact storage locations can be confusing on some Android devices, because there can be multiple locations/accounts where contacts can be entered or synced from. They could be syncing to a user's Google account, or (on Samsung phones) their Samsung account, or being entered directly into the phone's local storage. Pixel phones are less confusing, because out of the box, they only offer the user's Google account as the contact storage location (which is good, because the contacts automatically sync to the cloud). The local Phone storage/account does not sync anywhere automatically, so if a person enters contacts there, they would need to be manually backed up.

It'd be helpful to know where your wife was looking when she saw the duplicate contacts. If you search Google Contacts for a contact, it may show multiple entries, because it will not only find contact entries that the user saved to Google Contacts, but also contacts that are derived from the user's email and messaging history. A contact that the user manually entered would be shown under the heading "Contacts", while one that is derived from the email history would be under "Other contacts." It's possible she saw duplicates this way, and ended up deleting the one listed under "Contacts", which would've been the one she had originally saved to her own list.

Sorry if that sounds pretty convoluted, but like I said, it can be confusing, especially to the casual user.

 

[buckythewonderhorse]

It'd be helpful to know where your wife was looking when she saw the duplicate contacts.

She saw them (and deleted them) on her phone under "Contacts".

There are no phone numbers under Google Contacts (lots of email contacts - from her use of Gmail - but no phone numbers), so it looks like there was no automatic syncing between her phone contacts and Google Contacts.

As I hinted in my previous reply, she will probably just go through her Messages (texts/SMS) history and restore the contacts manually.