Samsung Smart Switch Not Reading Backup Folder, Contacts Lost

[mdmike11]

Hello everyone,

I'm hoping someone can help me with a dilemma. About two years ago, I backed up all my contacts to a memory card and then created a zip backup on an external hard drive. Recently, I lost my phone and decided to purchase a new Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra. In the interim, I used a Samsung Galaxy Note 10 as a temporary phone and linked my Google and Samsung accounts.

Unfortunately, I seem to have lost all my Google contacts' phone numbers—only the names and email addresses remain. The same issue appears in my Samsung account, which now only shows about 20 contacts instead of over 1000.

When I tried to restore my contacts using my zip backup, I found that Samsung Smart Switch on my laptop wouldn't recognize the backup folder. I've searched for every Samsung backup file type—*.spb, *.spba, *.spbm, *.csv, and others—but none of these file types exist in the backup folders. All I found were *.enc files.

I tried manually renaming "SmartSwitchBackup.enc" in the root folder to "SmartSwitchBackup.spb" and opened it with Smart Switch. The software recognized it as a contact backup, showing the date and time of the backup, and prompted me to save the data to a CSV file. However, the CSV only contained column headers—no actual contact information.

I also tried this with a file named "com.google.android.contacts.enc," which is 13.5 MB—the largest file by far, suggesting it contains my contact info. The same result occurred: Smart Switch recognized the file but the resulting CSV was empty.

When I made this backup, I specifically used Samsung Smart Switch (which was up-to-date at the time) because I was initially using a Galaxy S20 as my temporary phone. Switching between devices seems to have caused issues with my cloud accounts, something I hadn't anticipated. I made this hard copy backup as a precaution, and now it seems to be the only potential way to recover my contacts.

I'm at a loss as to why my Smart Switch backup consists entirely of *.enc files with none of the typical file types listed in the program. I took great care to back up all my important data.

Can anyone help me troubleshoot this and extract my contacts from these backup files?

Thank you so much for your time and any help you can offer. I'm looking forward to any guidance you can provide.

Kind regards,

Michael

[userABzWkNTMtv]

I know nothing about this really but I wonder if those numbers will show up in WhatsApp if they're not in your contacts first?

[mdmike11]

Thank you for the suggestion, that would be a great solutions because whatsapp would back up the conversations and restore them with the contact numbers only not display the names.

Unfortunately, I did the same thing - I backed up whatsapp while using my temp phone and it wrote over the primary backup.

This whole thing is quite a mess. lol

The really odd thing is about half my contacts  are still in my Google Contacts under 'Other Contacts' but it just shows their names and emails.  

[realaud]

Are you sure the .csv file only contains headers and no data?  Did you open the file with a text editor or excel?  There are a lot of headers in contacts and downloading Google contacts downloads every header whether or not there is data attached.

Frankly, I don't understand losing the contacts in Google, since it is independent of the phone itself.  Something would have to have happened within Google for that to happen.  In the many years I have been using Google contacts, I never lost a single one and accessed them from phone to phone to phone.  The beauty of having your contacts in Google is you don't have to import them or download them when you switch phones, The phones just read them, especially phones attached to your Google account (it may take some manipulating on iPhones).  Have you actually gone to the Google contacts website: contacts.google.com?