Its not androids fault you didn't have your contacts organized. It may be a pain for you this time around, but like I said before you should sync your important contacts to a different gmail/exchange account this time so you don't have these problems again in the future. Good luck.
{{ WugFresh }}
Are you serious? They don't get much more organized than that. I entered the contacts of people I wanted to call on the phone,
IT decided to download all my contacts from gmail into its address book and merge the two. I was fine with that because I could filter the list by **** I added, and **** it downloaded on its own.
It is most definitely Android's fault. As a SW developer I feel I am very capable of criticizing others' decisions.
At NO POINT during a backup process should data about the items being backed up be lost. That's what it means to have a true backup. It'd be like if you backed up your root directory (recursively), and the backup tool decided it didn't give a flying **** what your directory structure was - every file was just dumped into one folder, because a crucial piece of information was lost in translation.
The contacts app, having a marker on board that can differentiate between phone contacts and google contacts SHOULD have been able to back that data up as well, and any reasonable person would think that it does back up all the data. You can defend it all you want, but at the end of the day it was a poor SW engineering decision, plain and simple.
Information lost during backups is a sorry excuse for a backup...it'd be like you syncing your contacts and it not syncing contacts starting with X, W, Y, or Z, because it feels the frequency at which they're accessed typically isn't high enough so you probably wouldn't care if they were gone. Information was still lost, in this case, sorting information. It was there before the backup, wasn't after.
A better decision would have been to either choose what groups to back up (so you can back groups up separately), and/or add the data that was lost to the backup file. Not hard to prepend a group byte to each contact that contains the group info of it.
It's a stupid situation/decision if you think about it. What the hell is the purpose of backing up gmail contacts? Just in case all of Google's server farms go down? It's pretty useless if you think about it, in essence, it only makes sense to back up contacts which won't sync, phone contacts, which can then be imported back onto the phone.
Backing up cloud data to a single computer negates the concept of cloud data, which is what Google is all about. If anything it should only backup non-google contacts, or there should be some options, or it should not omit sorting data that it has at its disposal, lots of ways that could have been handled better.
I feel it's silly to have a separate gmail or exchange account just to sync my phone contacts too, to keep them separate from my gmail contacts, just seems like a waste to me.
That being said, what I did was I created a new group in my gmail account called "Phone Contacts" and am just going to add my contacts to that, then it can do a full sync, the people don't have e-mail addresses but it doesn't care, and I can filter by the ones I want on my phone, then there will be no actual specific phone contacts, everything will just be in the cloud and sync when it's modified. The only problem with this method is Google is going to try to get smart and start combining contacts, which I don't want.
Not sure if it may be weird to some people, but despite getting my e-mail on my phone, I'd like to keep my phone contacts and my e-mail contacts separate. I mean hooray if I can access my contacts for my e-mail in the e-mail app, but I certainly don't want them all lumped together.
. Should have known better than to trust programs that come on the phone :-\. At least I'll be getting a new phone on Monday or Tuesday...Then I'll just have to re-enter my phone contacts manually, and it'll grab the google contacts as soon as it syncs...but then they'll be separated and I can filter my contacts list to only show phone contacts.