Contacts disappeared after Android upgrade

Hi, thanks for responding. Here are answers to your questions and where I'm at now with my own problem solving.

1. 365 Family
2. Custom domain (legacy) hosted on outlook.com
3. Personal
4. Exchange
5. No, I foolishly trusted the cloud recovery function.

Even though I didn't have a backup and deleted contacts had nothing in it, I did, after some digging, find deleted contacts among my deleted e-mails in the folder called "Deleted items". I restored all deleted contacts, which contained all my missing contacts but also contacts deleted a long long time ago and many duplicated so it required a whole bunch of cleaning up. Exported to .csv file using desktop Outlook and used Excel to cleanup the contacts and then imported them back into Outlook. And now it seems all good in all locations, except that desktop Outlook insisted in filing everything with "Last name", "First name" instead of the other way around even though it is set as default. Half a day wasted but at least the information is saved. 🤷

Doing the cleaning I now see contacts in the Deleted folder under contacts, as it should be, but there seems to be a bug either in the Outlook app on Android or on the server side that makes it possible to delete contacts without putting the among Deleted contacts. Sure, the original error is most likely in Android or Samsung contact management but that should not be able to overrule the backup functionality on the Outlook servers.

Did you check the Deleted Items folder where your deleted e-mails go and not contacts? This is where I found them when logged in on Outlook.com on the web. They showed up as e-mails with [Unkown] as sender and were way down the list of deleted items. Might be worth as second look. Good luck!

Did you check the Deleted Items folder where your deleted e-mails go and not contacts? This is where I found them when logged in on Outlook.com on the web. They showed up as e-mails with [Unkown] as sender and were way down the list of deleted items. Might be worth as second look. Good luck!

Thank you for the helpful tip. I recovered about 500 lost contacts out of 1300! It seems they are all. My comment to looking for VCF in deleted mail is to do it few times and within 30 days from detecting problem, otherwise the trash is removed permanently. When I restored about 200 contacts for the first time, I realized, that Outlook is still loading the trash. So if you have a large number of contacts and got a lot of them lost you may need to review the trash untill there is real trash, like deleted email drafts etc. When I saw the deleted contacts in mail, they appeared as VCF and I could see the names in contacts.

That is so many deleted contacts that at the begining Outlook mail trash did not show all deleted ones. I had real email trash there so I needed to sort out the mail from deleted contacts. Then, the unseen deleted contacts started to appear. I had false 45 deleted items and it slowly turned out to be about 500! When you select them to undelete, the number is correct. Repeat it untill you are sure there is no deleted contacts and only deleted email.

To restore and sync 500 contacts you may wait till about 1 hour to sync it across devices. I noticed the problem with WhatsApp, where the known contacts with chat started to appear as telephone numbers, and then I realized that there is mess in contacts. Even when I got back a lost contact, for the moment it stays with the number, not a name. It may stay this way forever...

This is absolutely scarry, and Samsung should immediately stop sending this Android 12 update to A52G and reconsider the update to other mobile phones, untill the culprit is found that deletes contacts with wrong trash (i.e. not deleted contacts but deleted emails). Samsung and Microsoft collaborate and they should stop this mess, which costs a lot.

Regards

Marcin B.

I got the same problem on my Samsung A52s 5G. After installing Android 12, a lot of contacts were deleted.

Thanks to your post I found the deleted conctacts on Outlook.co in the Deleted folder under emails.

Microsoft and Samsung, please fix as soon as possible this bug!!

Hi e94_mli!

Thanks for getting back. I apologize for the inconvenience.

I am glad that you were able to find those deleted contacts. It might be that there was an unusual activity that happen on your account while you were upgrading to Android that triggers the server to remove or delete your contacts. But it's good thing that those contacts was on your deleted items folder. What I can suggest to you for this not to happen again is by doing a regular back up of your contacts or emails that are important from time to time because as we all know there are updates that occurs from time to time that may affects your important data from your device.

If you have any other concern in the future feel free to create a new thread using this link here: Create a new question or start a discussion (microsoft.com) ****

We thank you again for the time you've spent here in the community. You have a good day.

Sincerely

ReynaldoB

M365 Consumer Forum Moderator

Microsoft Community