How to Recover Lost Contacts from Android devices

Data is one of the most valuable assets in today’s world. Have you accidentally deleted important contacts from your phone? Were your documents on a PC erased by a virus? In either case, you might want to have them recovered and to prevent such an accident from happening you may want to backup your files on another device. Here we take a look at dr fone, a multipurpose app that allows you to recover lost info and backup your files as well as switch between different platforms!
In this article, we will see how dr fone helps you recover your lost contacts on an Android phone.
How It Works
You may people think that when a file is deleted from there device, it is deleted from its memory. That’s not true. Your deleted contact still remains somewhere in the phone memory. Dr fone is a tool that detects your deleted contact stored in your memory and resurrects it.
Dr. fone can resurrect that data in many common scenarios, such as when you delete your contact, can’t access your phone due to forgetting the password, the system crashing and apparently erasing some of your data, your SD card being corrupted, rooting errors, ROM flashing, damaged hardware, your system not responding and even having issues with your screen not turning on. I tested it in all but the damaged hardware scenarios on my OnePlus 5T, cause I couldn’t just drop my phone, but in the other scenarios at least it just works.
There are some steps you need to follow in order to setup the application to recover your lost contacts on your Android phone:
- Download the app on PC: The app works through USB debugging which needs to be enabled first on your Android phone. The debugging takes place on your PC. You can download the PC app here to take advantage of the app’s features!
- Connect your Android phone: Connect your Android phone to your PC using a USB cable and select “recover” option on the app on your computer. You will see a screen showing your phone and several options that you can choose, such as recovering your phone data, SD card data and recovering from a broken phone.
- Select Contacts: Dr fone displays all the file types you can scan and recover such as contacts, messages, photos, audio and WhatsApp messages. All the file types are selected by default. To make the process quicker, deselect them all and click on contacts. The files will be scanned in a few minutes. If your device
- Recover data on your phone: You can preview the data that has been recovered and select the items you want. They will be saved on your computer.
What You Need
Dr fone isn’t a very hardware intensive app, and you can run it on pretty much any modern PC and laptop. Still, if you have an old laptop and haven’t upgraded your PC in a long time, you might want to check the system requirements before spending your hard-earned money.
OS: Windows XP/Vista/7/8/8.1/10, Mac OS X/10.6/10.7/10.8/10.9/10.10/10.11
CPU: Any 1 GHz CPU
Here’s a list of viable CPU’s to run dr fone:
Intel Pentium 4/D/Dual Core/Sandy Bridge/Broadwell/Haswell/Skylake/Kaby Lake all models
Intel i3/i5/i7/i9 all generations all models
Ryzen 3/5/7/Threadripper all models
RAM: Minimum 512 MB
Recommended 1 GB
Hard Disk Space: 200 MB
On the Android version side, 2.1 and above are supported.
You would also want to know the supported Android manufacturers and smartphone models.
Supported Manufacturers: LG, Sony, Motorola, Google, HTC, Samsung, Huawei, Xiaomi, Honor, Lava, LeEco, Motorola, Oppo, Vivo, OnePlus
There is a list of all supported smartphones here so you can check in case you still have some doubts.
Recover Contacts from Phone with broken screen
One of the best features of dr fone, one that elevates it above many competitors, is that you can recover information even from a phone with a broken screen. Here is how you can do it. However, if you don’t want to go to the website itself, we’ve got you covered.
- Download on PC: Install the app on PC, click on “scan it” next to the “recover data from broken phone” option.
- Select Contacts: Various file types can be recovered but to recover contacts quickly you can deselect all other options that appear in the next window where you have to select file types you want.
- Select your hindrance to accessing your device: You can select whether the touch doesn’t work or you’re getting a black screen.
- Select model: Select your smartphone model.
- Bring your device into Download mode: You will be given instructions on how to bring your specific device into download mode.
- Review the Recovered Contacts: When the erased contacts have been recovered you can see a list of those contacts and pick the ones you want. These contacts will be saved and the rest will be erased from the harddrive.
Dr fone requires you to pay for some of the features. Its worth it if the contact you lost was valuable and if your phone is broken, but if its information that is not of much value there are many free alternatives that give you lesser results, but should suffice for casual use such as contact info of friends and relatives which you can get directly from them through other means. If its a business contact though, there is nothing this reliable in the market if you’re willing to pay a premium.
