My LG-G4 phone contacts do NOT appear in GMAIL, EVEN tohugh I sychronized them several times!

[Android Central Question]

Hi...
My LG phone, which, by the way bought only a couple of years ago, went "south" (broken, can't be fixed! :-( ) so I figure I check my PHONE contacts in my GMAIL account. I thought I have had synchronized my contacts a few times - in fact an employee from the MTN store where I bought my phone did it for me (!) the first time. Alas! When I tried to check my contacts, there is only a VERY small number.. (!) And even these might be because of emails - so my contacts it seems they NEVER "made it" to my GMAIL (?!?!?) This happened a couple of weeks ago. I tried to "recover" my contacts, hoping there was an older copy saved, to no avail (the earliest I can go back is just 30 days ago, anyway). Is there a way to retrieve my "lost" contacts - that is if they have really been lost? Perhaps when we synchronize, these contacts go somewhere else and we have to do a "get" of some sort, in order to appear in GMAIL?? If this is true, it means I my be able to get my contacts, but how is it done??

Ah, one thing I remembered - at some point my messenger got my phone contacts for getting messages. Is it possible that my contacts were "moved" in some way "somewhere"in messenger?!?? How can I retrieve contacts from messenger, then? I also had many contacts in viber. Will these reappear when I get a new phone and I install viber..?!?

PS: I do have a VERY OLD list in my computer (did not have a £smart phone" before), since 2010, as SEPARATE vcfs, and I guess I can merge these into one file (and convert it to csv and import it - but I won't have the most recent contacts of several years...

Thank you in advance for your time!!
James...

 

[B. Diddy]

Welcome to Android Central! This depends on which account you originally entered those contacts into. When you enter a new contact, you probably had a choice of saving it to your Google account or the local Phone account. Saving to your Google account automatically syncs it to your Google Contacts in the cloud (and hence is the best account to use, in my opinion). Saving to the local Phone account doesn't sync it anywhere -- it only stays locally on the phone, unless you manually back it up somewhere, usually with some 3rd party syncing app.

If all of those contacts were only saved to the Phone account, and you never backed them up, then they're gone. Sorry! In the future, always make sure you're entering new contacts into your Google account.