Help Finding lost contacts Samsung S4 Android 5.0.1

[Rough1]

Hello everyone,
after installing LP, I had heaps of problems with my wifi that after 3 days of trying, could not rectify.
So as a last resort, I made a backup and reset. Before I did this, I copied my whole phone (Card and Phone folders) onto my laptop for safety. Ha!
After doing the reset, the wifi problem seems to be resolved, but now Ive lost all my contacts. They were not saved to my google account, and I cant find them in either of the folders I saved to my laptop. Also, the Android data recovery programms that I have tried (Dr. Fone and Jihosoft) have not worked, for whatever reason.
Can anybody help? Surely the contacts must be saved to the device, the sim card or the sd card somewhere.
I am at my wits end.
This is looking like my last android phone...
Thx in advance
Simon

 

[girolez]

Hi

If they were sim contacts, they would still be on your sim card. They probably were not, its a very old way of doing things

If they were "Phone Contacts" they would have been stored in the internal storage of your phone in an area which you have no access to without rooting your phone. The factory reset would have deleted them. Any data recovery app would need to root your phone first in order even to look for them.

I think you are out of luck, but someone may know better........

Roger

 

[Hadron]

Unfortunately I agree. Like call logs, text messages and other internal app data, contacts are stored in the /data/data area. This is not visible to you without root, neither is it visible over a (MTP) USB connection to a computer, so plugging the phone in and copying "everything" will not get _any_ internal app data - all that lets you copy are the emulated ("internal") and actual sd cards.

If you had app data backed up with Google servers you may not realise what else your backup didn't include. But if you had your contacts saved "phone only" (not synced) they are gone unless you made a backup of your own.

If you ever used the "export" option in the phone app then you will have them saved as a vcf file, which your backup should have got. In that case you just need to "import" them back to the phone.

If you didn't make any explicit backup of your contacts I think it's unlikely that any of these data recovery tools will succeed. Certainly any tool that doesn't include USB debugging in its instructions has no chance whatsoever, even if you rooted the device (the phone won't let you mount the /data partition as USB mass storage).

Sorry.