I didn't read up on any forums like this prior to upgrading my firmware this evening. I have upgraded it without creating any type of backup of my contacts and lost them all, is their any way of restoring them? Most of the stuff of my phone - text messages etc was deleted. I plugged the phone into the computer and selected the contacts icon on the Nokia PC Suite and all my contacts appeared, and then approx 5 seconds later all disapeared - they must be their somewhere if that can happen surely?
Can anyone give me any advice on whether or not I can restore my contacts? I have checked the 'sim contacts' folder and the contacts it has on it are from a very long time ago.
Thanks a lot.
Are you syncronizing with Outlook? If so, your contacts should be in the recycle bin.
I wish you had your contacts backed up in Outlook,ZYb or may be if you had a vopium software www.vopium.com
Hello 2009,
I did the same thing like 4 hours ago. My problem was that I thought if I data transfered from my phone to my pc before updating it would be sweet and obviously didn't read the pcsuite backup so thinking that the contacts would all be part of that transfer.
I am using Vista so feel free to tweak this for use with another operating system. I also guess that due to the length of time since your post that you have pretty much added most of your contacts again, but hopefully this is still an available option to you or to others.
Anyways. I went searching for the actual data from PC Suite which as you said popped up for 5 secs and disappeared and lucky enough I found it located in a folder called PC Suite at this address C:\Users\*main user*\AppData\Roaming\PC Suite\359542010232443 (this string here will be different for your account).
Inside that folder is pretty much all the stuff that was recently on your phone or well in my case it was, that is SMS, Contacts, Contactgroups etc.
There are 3 files here that involve your contact information - I have contacts.dat which seems to hold the current contact information from my phone.
Contacts.xml which holds all the information on how it should be added to the phone's database.
PCCSContacts.db is a database file and if you open it up in notepad you will see the following
��6˜H@ � �~ yBEGIN:VCARD
VERSION:2.1
REV:20081009T011008Z
N:;My comp wireless;;;
TEL;CELL:0000000
X-CLASS😛rivate
END:VCARD
Now I have edited the phone details obviously don't need a phone number of mine out there. But pretty simply the N: Stands for the contact name. Tel; Cell is obviously the cell number. As I was pretty basic with how much detail I put on my phone there would only be the 2 things but you may have more fields.
If you go through you may just find all the contacts you had lost. I do have a task on my hands to now get all this information from this file and the others back onto my phone.
Good luck and I hope this helps you. Trust me I was in a big panic a few hours ago. Feel free to contact me via PM with how you went.
p.s please excuse any spelling errors as I am writing this at 2am.
For future reference, I always sync my phone with PC Suite, then do a Backup with PC Suite and finally I go into Contacts on the phone and select Mark all and then copy them to Memory (along with a phone backup to memory), just in case. That way I have three fall backs.
[email protected] wrote:For future reference, I always sync my phone with PC Suite, then do a Backup with PC Suite and finally I go into Contacts on the phone and select Mark all and then copy them to Memory (along with a phone backup to memory), just in case. That way I have three fall backs.
For sure mate. I will make sure I do a proper backup and everything next time. Long day at work and now this is the drama that has kept me up all night. Hahaha well atleast it is there though.
Finding myself in the same situation as you guys, I wrote a program to turn PCCSContact.db into a bunch of VCF (vcard file - business card format common to many phones, outlook etc) files that you can import back into your phone..
http://sourceforge.net/projects/noknokwhosthere/ for the software, readme etc
You'll need to use PC Suite to re-import the VCFs.. advantage of using them over other methods is that they preserve all the contact info, addresses, email, fax, thumbnail pic etc..