Copy my contacts from my old phone

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I am trying to copy my contacts from my old phone which I have open in windows explorer. i can’t access the phone itself the screen is broken. Where do I find contacts? They are not on the SIM or the external card which I have already placed in the new phone. I have no google or cloud accounts

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I’m not an expert, but I think you did give too less information to your possible helpers.
Have you saved the contacts in window?
Which app have you used to save contacts in your phone?
Did you have an external SD-Card? Did you use it as default (for data exchange with other devices) or as a common memory with the phone RAM?
Do you remember, where you saved the contacts.
Pls. remark, if it may possible to restore the data an you have not saved the data in an external device or SD-Card, you have to use your phone in “blind mode”, cause broken screen.

3

I saved the contacts in my Xperia L4 when it worked. I can not get into it but have conected it to the computer where I can see the folders. Path is Computer\Xperia L4\Internal shared storage\Android\data\com.simplemobiletools.smsmessenger\files

I was using Simple Mobile Tools SMS app and it was the default app for sending text messages

Pls. remark, if it may possible to restore the data an you have not saved the data in an external device or SD-Card, you have to use your phone in “blind mode”, cause broken screen.

I do not have the messages on an external SD

Thanks

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Edit 2: If your adb debugging or adb usb works fine, you can try and launch that activity via adb and hopefully it works.

Edit: If you can somehow call the intent/activity: com.android.providers.contacts.debug.ContactsDumpActivity, then it will start a dump of all you contacts and call logs to the internal Download folder. You can then someway extract from that file.

Now my previous answer.

The contacts database can be queried using the ADB shell:

adb shell content query --uri content://com.android.contacts/data

The command will dump all the content of the database only if the shell have the permission READ_CONTACTS, else it will fail.

This might not give you in actual vcf format, but at least you may get something here.

adb backup -all -f backup.ab

I would have suggested adb backup, but the inbuilt android.telephony has manifest defining backup as not allowed and its corresponding database cannot be read and or exported by adb. So no go there.

Adb pull also cannot help for the same reason as above.

One very interesting answer I found here: :sweat_smile: cyanogenmod - How to manually restore Call Log from adb backup on OnePlus One? (SMS already restored) - Android Enthusiasts Stack Exchange

Read on below…

Also, if it matters:

  • /data/data/com.android.providers.telephony/databases is where you’ll find the database for SMS/MMS
  • /data/data/com.android.providers.contacts/databases/ is where you’ll see the Contacts and the Call logs

You can now stop reading if you’re satiated by the answer, and I recommend to get busy in finding some recovery methods to regain access to Contacts and Call logs.

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  • data/data/com.android.providers.telephony/databases is where you’ll find the database for SMS/MMS
  • /data/data/com.android.providers.contacts/databases/ is where you’ll see the Contacts and the Call logs

Thanks. I do not seem to have data/data/com.android.providers.telephony/databases or the other path

I have Computer\Xperia L4\Internal shared storage\Android\data\com.simplemobiletools.smsmessenger\files but the files folder is empty

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