lost contacts

[wei666]

I lost all contacts in my Samsung cellphone when I reset it. Can anyone know how can I recover the contacts. Thanks.

[wei666]

hi wei666,

unfortunately you can not recover your lost contacts, but you can prevent this problem from happening in the near future by following this simple helpful tip below:

Chances are you are syncing your email address to your phone to read emails, you can sync the address book of that email account to your phone so any time you store a contact into your phone's internal contact list, it will automatically Sync up to the Contacts on your email account too. So if you were to have your phone wiped, all your phones address book contacts will still be on the cloud of your email account. 

[zyx]

Since you are using an Android phone, an even better option would be to save your contacts to your Google account rather than your phone. It syncs automatically, and you won't even need to transfer your contacts when you get a new phone / reset your phone - just link to your Google account and all your contacts are there. No need to backup and restore. Bonus: you can use your home computer to manage (add/update/delete) contacts too.

[FidoAmanda]

Thanks for the awesome tip, zyx! That'll definitely help out a lot of people on the Community!

[Paolo]

That is correct, you can Sync your contacts with Google (G-Mail) because you create a google account when you setup your android, you can also sync your contacts with a Yahoo Mail account or Microsoft Hotmail account (for those people who wish to NOT use the required google account.

And a little extra tip/correction from the previous tip, you are still saving your contacts in the Phone's address book, but it also places a copy of it on the email account of your choice, this is called syncing,  you are NOT storing them on the google only directly (unless you do it from your home computer)

[FidoAmanda]

Thanks for sharing this with the Community, Paolo! 

[Paolo · Accepted solution]

hi wei666,

unfortunately you can not recover your lost contacts, but you can prevent this problem from happening in the near future by following this simple helpful tip below:

Chances are you are syncing your email address to your phone to read emails, you can sync the address book of that email account to your phone so any time you store a contact into your phone's internal contact list, it will automatically Sync up to the Contacts on your email account too. So if you were to have your phone wiped, all your phones address book contacts will still be on the cloud of your email account. 

[wei666]

Thank you, Paolo. I also lost all text messages. Can I recover it?

[FidoPamela]

Hey @wei666! 

Welcome to the Community  

This would also apply to text message. Unless you had a back up, it would not be possible to recover them. 

With most smartphone a back up would save your text messages as well.