Gmail Woes

cormie

Just had a bit of a scare there, thankfully nothing too serious as I caught it in time, but I noticed that about 5 contacts I saved earlier in my phone today, somehow disappeared, they were in the phone book and then later when I checked, weren't. I save them to a group on Gmail. I then tried to save another, it saved ok and showed up in Handscent with a name and everything from their text and then the next time I looked it the saved contact was gone aswell.

Restarted the phone and put them all in again and it seems fine now, thankfully I had all numbers to hand but it could have caused a lot of stress had I not.

Gmail seemed to update automatically after I put each contact in, but when I went to "export" it still showed the list as having less than it did, although when I exported the CSV file, it had them all and then aswell the next time I went to gmail.com after closing the browser and going back, they were all accounted for in the export option list.

I tried the "restore" option in the contacts but it didn't do much or give many options or even an "undo restore" option.

Also, I have another group on my desire with contacts from the other group and there are 19 listed contacts in the group on my phone but on gmail.com, only 11 show up

It's making me a bit uneasy

cormie

Arghh! Happened again, just saw a contact disappear right in front of my eyes when I had the phonebook open!

Pimp Ninja

Try logging into Google.com/contacts and check there.

Abelloid

That's odd, I've just seen a contact complete with profile pic (never seen it before) appear on my phone, when I went back to check it had disappeared..

cormie

Pimp Ninja wrote: »

Try logging into Google.com/contacts and check there.

I'm afraid they aren't there either. Exact same as the last day when it happened. I added new contacts and the next time I look in my phone book, they have been deleted.

I'm not sure if it's anything to do with the amount of contacts I have (over 1800) but I hope not as if it is, it won't be a very common problem and I'm less likely to find a solution.

long_b

Have to ask - are you syncing anything else to Google ?
I've had contacts move from "my contacts" back out to the general "Contacts" before - that means they don't show up on my iPhone until I add them back in ?

cormie

I don't save my numbers in "my contacts" I save them all in a separate group, lets call it "cormie", so cormie has 1833 contacts now, my contacts 1295 and then "all contacts" when I go to more actions and the export option, there is 1838, this is including 5 gtalk and gmail contacts I've saved, I don't use gtalk much. So the 1833 cormie contacts are all phone contacts, as in I've saved their name and number, nothing else. I save each contact to this group upon entering a new contact, they go straight into this group and this has become 2nd nature to me now.

With gmail, I also sync 2 calendars and my mail and whatever else too I guess. This has always been the case and I've never had any problems until I posted the first post here. Today the exact same happened and both times, rebooting the phone made me able to save them again properly.

zing

Something I noticed for the first time today that may be useful for you.

In gmail (regular browser based rather than phone app) go to contacts -> More actions & there's a "Restore Contacts" option. No idea why contacts are disappearing but this might help you recover the ones you've lost.

cormie

Thanks for that, tried it and they weren't there. It's hard to know when to restore it to because I don't know when they disappeared and they may even be disappearing before they even have a chance to sync with gmail?

cormie

Strange again, group A in gmail showing as 1855 contacts, on phone the same group shows 1854 contacts

Stench Blossoms

Long shot: Have you got 'only show contacts wth phones' clicked? Could that be where your missing contact is?

cormie

Nope, that's unticked for me, thanks for the suggestion though

G1032

cormie wrote: »

Strange again, group A in gmail showing as 1855 contacts, on phone the same group shows 1854 contacts

That's a lot of contacts.............................

cormie

Found the culprit. It actually happened me before. I may have saved the same number twice in my phone somehow and it goes into the one contact, when you click the contact in the phone book, you then see two separate contacts within that contact. Gmail sees this as two separate entries as opposed to the one which is where the discretion comes from. I tried the find duplicate option on gmail but it doesn't really work well, it doesn't find if there are two separate entries with the same phone number.

Thanks for the suggestions anyway

Serephucus

I had stuff like this happen to me a lot - allbeit with a lot less contacts, closer to forty - and the long and short of it is that you're much better off adding and managing your contacts through Gmail, rather than the phone. Things seem to work out a lot better that way.

cormie

thanks for the suggestion but it's much easier to just save the number off the phone after a call is received etc for me personally, also means you have a name beside a number if you need to phone them back etc if your recent call list has a lot of unrecognised numbers you can just save the relevant ones for future use.

jimmycrackcorm

I think the whole contacts thing needs some clarity. I've a problem with trying to have a single contact for herself as only the sim details is showing up for the phone number when I want to link it in with her Facebook details. I've also multiple entries for contacts that I cannot consolidate evening using a contact analyzer app to merge / de-duplicate.

Serephucus

Oh of course, but I meant more save them in your phone when you have the number, but when you next get a chance, it'd make you life easier in the long run to add them to your Gmail contacts. This stops disappearing contacts and the like, and they'll still sync with your phone.

Edit: @ jimmy. I've had this issue too. Again, my only solution was to use Gmail on my desktop to clean out and organise my contacts. By default, Gmail stores your phone contacts seperately to your email contacts, but you can of course transfer/copy, etc.

cormie

Thanks again for the suggestion, I have one group only synced with my phone, this is separate to the "my contacts"/"all contacts" in gmail so this is where all my contacts go. It's grand keep going as I am and I remember this happening ages ago too but it's a simple enough fix once you remember I'm never on gmail either as I don't use my @gmail address for anything but I'm always at my phone

BionicRasher

Noticed something similar yesterday - scared the life out of me as I would be lost without all my contacts (although I must say at least Android and Gmail are a great way of having a backup compared to just losing your phone and bang all you contacts are gone as was the case on all the old dumbphones I had prior to Android)

Anyway story goes...
I entered a contact on my phone last week and yesterday I got an email address to add to this contact detail. So as I was sitting at my PC I thought I would update the details via Gmail. But.....the contact wasn't in Gmail even though it was in the phone. After a lot of messing about and trying to look at sync details and settings on the phone I turned to my Google account. I checked what was able to access my account (in Account Settings) and here you can see what is Authorized to Access your Google Account and Connected Sites, Apps, and Services etc. All looked fine.
In the end I had to remove the Google account from my sync profile on the phone and reconnect it. I also cleared my contacts cache/data on the phone in the Accounts/Sync section. That removed all my contacts on the phone (I had done a back up in Gmail to .csv before this just in case)
Once I set up sync again it took a few hours for all my stuff to come back in to the phone. Now everything seems fine but I will keep an eye on it just in case.

P.S. I am having a problem with a couple of Facebook calendars that I have synced to Gmail also at the moment so not sure if there is a larger problem about to kick off