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How to restore my contacts

V

Vybz

Lurker
Hi all,

I am new here. I have an issue. My S7 edge's screen got damaged so I got a new phone. I have a Xiaomi Mi A2. I was lucky to connect the s7 to my laptop and enter the pin to unlock it even with the screen not coming on. I copied all the folders to my laptop. My issue is which of those folders are my contacts. I never backed them up to my google account. I am now doing that with my new phone but i want to copy my contacts from my old phone.

Also for my S7 i think i saw somewhere that you can set it up so you can use your computer as the display for you phone. I think you plug it in by usb and there is some app you use. Do you guys know how to do this? or even what I am talking about?

Also there is no Mi A2 in the device list here on the forums maybe we can get it added.
 
Have you ever backed up the contacts on your S7? If not they will be stored only in an internal database in the /data/data area. You need root to access that directly, and if you just copied the user-accessible folders from your phone's internal storage you will not have those data.

If you can manage to mirror the display and get into the contacts app there will be an option to "export" your contacts. That will write them to a VCARD file (.vcf) which you can then import to your new phone. Or of course you could turn contact sync on I guess, depending on how they are stored.

I don't know the mirroring options on the S7. Older Samsung's supported mhl, which worked as you say (plug in a special adapter then connect to a display) but Samsung stopped supporting that with the S6. There are various wireless mirroring options but good luck turning those on blind. As for other means of connecting via hdmi, the web is full of inconsistent information (as always), but people who claim success also had to install an app or change some settings on their phone before it worked, which again may be hard to do blind. See here for a thread on the issue.
 
As @Hadron referred to, the Contacts app on your S7 doesn't store your contact entries in a folder you can just copy off somewhere. They're all stored in a mini-database file that resides in a system partition. The issue being even if you could access that database file, its contents isn't just something you can open up with a text editor and retrieve your contacts info, that's just not how it works.
Even if your S7E screen was working, you would need to either use the export function in the Contacts app to save your contacts into a file that is transferable, or use a third-party app that's specifically designed to extract the data inside that database file and convert it to a usable, transferable file.
 
Ok so good news I got my contacts back. Google asked if I wanted to restore contacts from my old phone. Which made me happy. So thanks for your help happy ending.

I just wonder why it didn't restore from the beginning and I checked my Google but didn't see my contacts. I am just new to this stuff I guess.
 
In your initial posting you stated that you, "...never backed them up to my google account" an indication that you didn't have the Contacts app in your phone synced with your online Google account.
More details on how you were then able to use Google to restore your contacts please. There's a contradiction that needs to be clarified.
 
Well I started adding some contacts manually. Then in the suggestions tab there was a item that asked me if I wanted to restore my contacts from my old phone. Thing is I checked before o post this thread and I didn't see my contacts. Maybe I did something wrong.
 
Well the reason I didn't think I backed it up was because I looked to restore my contacts before posting and did not succeed so I came here.
 
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