Contacts search help please B4 I jump ship...

LOVE MY PASSPORT.
Total Blackberry fanboy. Buy I am getting choked. On a recent holiday, I started noticing my contacts were going missing, Like at least 3 that I really needed while away.
I half heartedly did a 'contact restore" and "merge". Now all of a sudden I had over 10,000 contacts all duplicate.

Bought new app, to clean thing up, and this seemed to work! But now, the search feature in "contacts" wont work, and sometimes I cant find the contact I am looking for. Sometimes if I wait 10-15 seconds, it pops up, but way less than 50% of the time. I cant have this.....

So I am backing everything up again, to multiple places (SD Card, drop box, already have a back up on my Mac, and I am ready to do a factory reset and restore to get things back.....

Is this what tou guys would do?? Should I be trying anything else first? I have done a bunch of searches, but am a little bit frustrated right now.

Please, give me your best advice people.....It drives me nuts that my wife and sons Iphones dont ever do this stuff.....

Thank you.

Greetings and sorry to hear you are having hassles - I feel your pain.

The BB10 contacts app is not without its fair share of issues. With all its machinery for merging, displaying multiple accounts, syncing and sharing, it can be prone to problems. Once the database of contact details starts to become cluttered with duplicate entries etc., it becomes more difficult for the app to deal with the data, so I reckon that backing up the already corrupted data won't help, as you will just re-create the problems when you restore it. I think the trick is to start with a "clean" contacts database.

Here is what I did :

I installed an app called "ContactsImEx" (available for free on BB World). Then I exported my contacts to SD card as a CSV file. I did take the trouble to check the CSV to make sure that the data was all present and correct, and that there were no duplicate entries - perhaps not necessary to do this but it can't hurt. After that, I deleted ALL contacts from the device. At the same time, in the contacts settings, I switched off all merging/unmerging, and made sure that all entries under "Show Account in Contact List" were switched off.

I then switched off the device. Upon switching on again, I checked, just to make sure my settings in the contacts app had been preserved, and then closed the app. I then ran the "ContactsImEx" app again and imported the previously created CSV from my SD card. Contacts app has behaved fine since then. I still keep the merging/unmerging switched off, because I think that is where things start to go wrong in the Contacts app.

I've heard that BB have been working on the Contacts app, and that it is much more reliable in the latest builds - the thing is though, once the database starts to become corrupted with duplicate entries etc., it seems that the Contacts app starts to struggle. If you then use a different contacts app on the already corrupted data, you risk further compounding the problem - not all contacts apps work the same way when it comes to dealing with databases.

From my own experience, and from what I've read on these forums, the Contacts app has a way to go yet, before it can be considered fully reliable in all its functions. Therefore, I try not to push it too hard at the moment - keep it simple!! And keep a known good CSV somewhere for reference, which you can re-import at any time if you need to.

Others may have different solutions to offer, but this is what has worked for me.

(By the way, I'm on a Z30, running 10.3.1.2744)

Originally Posted by chrispmoto

LOVE MY PASSPORT.
Total Blackberry fanboy. Buy I am getting choked. On a recent holiday, I started noticing my contacts were going missing, Like at least 3 that I really needed while away.
I half heartedly did a 'contact restore" and "merge". Now all of a sudden I had over 10,000 contacts all duplicate.

Bought new app, to clean thing up, and this seemed to work! But now, the search feature in "contacts" wont work, and sometimes I cant find the contact I am looking for. Sometimes if I wait 10-15 seconds, it pops up, but way less than 50% of the time. I cant have this.....

So I am backing everything up again, to multiple places (SD Card, drop box, already have a back up on my Mac, and I am ready to do a factory reset and restore to get things back.....

Is this what tou guys would do?? Should I be trying anything else first? I have done a bunch of searches, but am a little bit frustrated right now.

Please, give me your best advice people.....It drives me nuts that my wife and sons Iphones dont ever do this stuff.....

Thank you.

The search isn't functioning properly because of the large number of contacts. It's lagging. How many email and other accounts do you have on your phone? If you didn't change any default sync settings when you added your accounts to your phone then the contacts app will be pulling contacts from all of them at once and displaying them together. So, for example all 6 email accounts, plus facebook, plus SIM contacts, plus Device Contacts e.t.c... The merge function can sometimes merge contacts which shouldn't be merged. Different contacts with the same name for example. Also by default when you add a new contact it saves to all of your accounts at the same time. You have the option of choosing which accounts you would like them to save to though but you have to remember to do this each time you add a new contact.

I fixed mine by going into my contacts app and manually deleting all duplicate contacts. First I went into settings and turned off the Automatically Merge Contacts option. I also set it to Unmerge Existing Contacts before I began. I went as far as removing all of the Links as well but the links are really supposed to prevent you from seeing duplicates if you have the same contact saved to more than one account. If you go into contacts then tap on a contact then tap on Links you will see what account the contact is stored in. When I cleaned mine up, I manually unlinked as many as possible and deleted the (now separate and duplicate) contacts and kept only one from one source. You need to decide if you really want your contacts to be pulled from and saved to multiple accounts at the same time or if you want them saved to the device alone or SIM alone.

Also in Settings under Show Account in Contact List, I turned off Facebook. The root of the problem is having contacts synched to multiple accounts and then they're not automatically being linked correctly. To avoid it you can go into Setup then Accounts and turn off sync contacts for the ones you don't want synched.



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You see that tiny text in blue that should really be in giant bold letters there? That's the problem there. Go into it and see how many accounts you don't need to be synching contacts to at the same time. If you need that multiple account synch then prepare to deal with the fallout of incorrectly merged and linked contacts and the duplicates that can result when things don't work as well as they should.

Hopefully by the time 10.3.2 is released they should have improved the implementation.

Just woke up and have to run. Thank you for the reply, not enough time to fully read these yet but I really appreciate the help....! Thank you.

I had a fairly recent back up (thanks Backup Pro!!) and that really saved my bacon.
I did the factory reset, restore, and voila, everything is good!! Just have to re download Snap at a buddies and I will really be rolling.

Probably freed up a bunch of space on my phone with the reset too. Didn't need a lot of the crapp that I had accumulated. Phone feels zippy!!

Later guys, thanks for your time.......

Posted via CB10

It's a shame Blackberry continues without addressing this long time issue. Even a USD 100 WP manages properly contacts. I'm also thinking about move to a better system where my contacts are properly managed.

Posted via CB10

I am not sure what is more frustrating, that the contacts in OS10 are always acting up or that I never had any issues with contacts in Legacy OS and BlackBerry managed to screw contacts up.


Posted via Passport

My experience has been much more stable with contacts and it could be because I only use one email to store non local contacts.

T-Mobile  вιaсĸвεггч� Passport � Autoloaded 10.3.1.2582 Sachesi upgraded to 10.3.1.2744

This time when I added my (3) email accounts I did NOT allow to sync my contacts with my email or calendars.

If they are important, they are in my phone....so far so good....!! Phone seems zippy!!!

Posted via CB10

Originally Posted by chrispmoto

This time when I added my (3) email accounts I did NOT allow to sync my contacts with my email or calendars.

If they are important, they are in my phone....so far so good....!! Phone seems zippy!!!

Posted via CB10

Excellent!!! I'm glad you got through!!! Took me years to kinda understand why it behaves the way it does. On two Samsung Galaxy phones that I've used the default behaviour is to save contacts to the device only.

Be careful if you're going to sync contacts with Link after you clean them up since Link can put back some of the stuff that you fixed. You can avoid this by doing adjusting the settings in Link Contact Sync to do a one way sync from device only after you clean everything up.

Posted via CB10