Recovering Deleted Android Contacts When Your Parents Do Something Stupid!
Recover Your Lost Android Contacts & Messages Now
Parents, they were put on this planet to challenge us, usually around anything to do with technology. Much like how a necklace can tie itself in a knot that you couldn’t replicate if you tried, our parents can find ways of breaking technology in ways that just leave you speechless. As it was when my mum decided she wanted a new phone…it takes real skill to manage to delete all her old contacts and SMS messages with migrating absolutely nothing.
I’m sure this will sound familiar to a lot of people, the story goes like this. Parent buys a new Android phone, parent has phone shop swap SIM card over. Parent asks phone shop to wipe their old phone so that they can sell it. Old Android phone is factory reset, new Android phone is used for a day or 2 right up to the point where they try to call somebody and discover that none of the contacts are on the new phone. Not only that but all the old SMS messages are gone as well. What do you do?
The first thing to try is to see if the Gmail account associated with the old phone has a backup of the contacts, I’ve never found it to be the case but it is at least worth trying. The next step is to see if the old phone was actually factory reset or if the messages are still on there. Once or twice I’ve found with older Android phones that a reset was never a proper reset. If that’s a no go then you tell your parent that they are going to have to enter all their contacts in again…or more likely end up doing it for them as they pull upset faces at you! The solution I came up with in my mums case (she runs a small hobby business and needed all her old messages as well) was much simpler and the best few dollars I’ve spent in a long time.
I searched the web until I came up with a bit of recovery software that promised to be able to recover Android contacts and SMS messages. Even better it had a free trial. So I downloaded the free trial, plugged in the old reset phone, then it showed me everything it could recover! Result. A quick purchase later and I was on my way to recovering everything we needed. It was then just a case of adding the Gmail account back on, backing up (SMS to Google Drive) and moving everything over via import on the new phone. Once complete the old phone could be reset again and moved to its new owner.
I’ve worked in the software industry for over 25 years and it still amazes me just how much my mum can come up with new ways of breaking things and giving out technical challenges. Thankfully this was one that somebody else had already solved and the bit of money spent saved me a serious amount of development time so I’m happy. If you find yourself stuck needing to recover deleted Android contacts and or messages then I can’t recommend this software strongly enough, a real life saver (well time saver anyway).