When you store any kind of data on your phone, be it photos, documents, or phone numbers, you tend to assume at first that they will be safe and will never disappear. Unfortunately, it is a mistake that many of us tend to fall into and, when something goes wrong, we cannot do much more than shout to the sky.
The case of the contacts that we keep on the mobile is particularly complicated because losing a phone number can lead us to lose a job, lose sight of an important friend or lose the love of our life, met last night at the trendy bar (read this with an image prior to the year of pandemic that we have)
Luckily, there are some things we can do to recover disappeared contacts from the mobile, whether they have been deleted by mistake or on purpose.
Why do my mobile contacts disappear?
Answering this question is not easy as there may be several reasons.
Sometimes it is due to a technical problem updating the smartphone. Whether your phone runs on iOS or Android , software updates to update your phone with the latest features can cause your contacts to get lost depending on where they are stored.
At other times, an unauthorized application may be causing problems. Some are easier to fix than others, but if the problem persists, then it might be worth rechecking recently installed apps to see if removing one or revoking their permissions stops contacts from disappearing.
Buy recover deleted contacts from mobile
Before trying to recover contacts on the mobile , it is important to differentiate if they have disappeared completely or if, directly, they have been hidden from the user’s eyes.
Recover Contacts on Android
If you are using an Android device, the system can sometimes hide the contacts making it appear that they have been deleted. Fortunately, there is a simple way to check if this is the case.
Open the “Contacts” or “Phone” application and scroll to the tab where you have the phone numbers stored. Click on the menu in the upper right corner (three vertical dots). Select Settings and find an option similar to “Contacts display” or “Contacts to display.” It allows to show “All contacts”, which will show those stored in the phone, in the SIM and in Google.
Still can’t find them?
- Then we must make use of the backup that Google has linked to the mobile. When you first set up your account on your phone, you likely automatically agreed to transfer your contacts. If so, the good news is that you can restore all your contacts directly to the phone.
To do this, open the mobile settings and access the “Accounts” section. Inside you must click on “Google” and select the email account that you have synchronized on your mobile. Within the “Synchronization” options, it is time to click on the contacts option. This will restore the stored backup of your account and show the missing contacts.
- Another option is to work directly with the Google app, as long as you have not roasted a month since the contact disappeared.
Go back to the mobile Settings and locate the “Google” menu and then scroll down until you find Configure and restore. Select this option and then click on Restore contacts . All previous backups will be listed, so just choose the one you want and it will be restored to the device. Of course, keep in mind that contacts added after the backup date will not appear again, so write down the new contacts before restoring the old ones.
Recover Contacts on iOS
Changing iPhone, restoring the device or syncing music can sometimes delete our contact data. If this is what happens, the easiest way to get them back is through iCloud, as long as you’ve enabled iCloud contact syncing (something normally marked as default).
Access iCloud.com with your Apple credentials and, once inside, click on your account Settings. At the bottom, on the left side you should find the option “Restore contacts”. The available versions are listed by date and time when they were archived and to recover the lost contacts on your iPhone you simply have to click the right of the version you want to restore.
The contacts file that you are restoring will replace the contacts on all the devices synced with your iCloud account, so they would automatically appear on your iPhone. Just in case, the current contacts on the device will be activated automatically to retrieve them later if you need to.
What to do so that you do not have problems with contacts again?
If you are unable to locate your contacts via these methods, they are unfortunately likely to be lost forever. For this reason, it is always a good practice to regularly back up all the important information that we store on the phone. Activate the synchronization of the contacts as we have shown previously or export the contacts to a .csv format on a regular basis from the phone app settings, Import / Export contacts. This file can always be recovered as long as you do not formalize the smartphone and clean its internal memory.
You can always make use of different software tools that allow you to recover deleted content from your mobile but, despite the fact that they are not free tools, 100% success is not guaranteed.