Erased contacts on phone

[tstack77]

I recently reformatted my home pc and tried to sync my touch last night. I got the popup saying that my phone wasn't able to connect to the "new" pc so without a thought I erased the old pc from my phone's sync settings.

Not a good idea.

It completely erased all my contacts, notes, and calendar settings that I was attempting to sync to my computer. This is not the same as a backwards sync from my computer to the phone, nothing was overwritten because it never synced. I haven't touched a thing since then and am hoping that the contacts are still somewhere on my Touch. Is there a place that I can look?

[bedoig]

When you delete a sync relationship, you erase anything that was synced from the computer/exchange server to the device. Anything that was input directly on the device should still be there, but it sounds like all your contacts/events/etc came from your computer. Unless you have a backup of the data from your PC before you formatted, I think it is all lost.

Contacts/events/etc are stored in "pim.vol" on the root of your device. In the future you can make a quick backup by just copying that file to your storage card.

[Hafrust]

In addition to copying the pim.vol file as mentioned in the previous post, you could also install dashwire which allows you to backup your information online (and it's free). I've been burned in the past with corrupted pim files on my sd card, so I occasionally backup to dashwire as an added measure.

[bedoig]

Agreed. Multiple backups are always a good idea. I rarely (if ever) use the pim.vol backup on my storage card, but I have it there anyway. I keep all my Outlook content synced with an exchange server, so an OTA resync gets everything back after a hard reset.

[tstack77]

I originally synced my Touch with all my outlook contacts last November. But in the meantime I have added countless contacts and they're all gone too

I looked and found a pim.vol file dated as yesterday and is 464K...could this be my old contact info (roughly 200 contacts = 464K)? If so, how do I get them back in my contacts list?

[Hafrust]

The pim.vol file is a file that is automatically opened upon windows booting, so if your contacts were in there they would be showing on your device now. Unfortunately, it looks like your info is gone.

[tstack77]

That is amazing! I can't believe that there isn't a trashcan or other place to look! It was WAY too easy to delete such important data. I didn't even reset the phone or try to sync again. ARGH!

I hate learning things the hard way.

[hammey22]

I had this happen to me as well some time back. I wish I would have posted here rather then beating my head against the wall. Thanks for this info, I have now made a copy on my SD card for future. I have actually stopped syncing as I didn't want that to happen to me again. Thanks a lot!

[Negrito]

Google pim backup. 2.8 is the newest but i believe i have the 2.7 Its a great little tool. set a schedule for it to back up to SD and you never have to worry about it again.