Dozens of Contacts Groups have disappeared
LearningAsIGo71 opened this issue · 14 comments
Here's what happened:
- Imported Google contacts VCF file in Etesync 2.2.4 on my CalyxOS (Android 11, Calyx 2.10.0) phone. For some reason only about 90% of contacts were appearing on my phone.
- Logged into Etesync on the web and could see the missing contacts. Hit refresh and the remaining contacts moved over to the phone.
- However, dozens of Contact Groups disappeared from my phone and from Etesync web. I cannot find them anywhere.
Any idea how to recover the Groups?
Do you see them in the change history?
No, unfortunately I do not see the Contact Groups in the Change Journal. The morning I logged into the website to see if it contained contacts that were missing from my phone, it shows 2000+ contacts as Modified, and the last item in the list from that time period is just one Contact Group listed as Modified. That is the only Contact Group that remains on my phone, the other 89 contact groups are missing.
Perhaps the error is a result of how many Groups I have?
Update:
- I deleted all my contacts using Simple Contacts.
- I confirmed all contacts were removed from Contacts both on the phone and on Etesync web.
- I reimported the contacts via a Google VCF file using Simple Contacts with EteSync as the save location.
- All 2000+ Contacts and the 89 Contact groups imported into Simple Contacts, but only the Contacts imported into EteSync, Not a single Group is shown made it into EteSync and therefore the default CalyxOS Contact app doesn't show any Groups either.
More problems! Without any input from me Etsy has deleted all my contacts beginning with the letter A, B, and C up to Ce. This appears in the log file and when I access Etsy on the web. Thankfully it does not appear to have effected the contacts on my phone even though syncing is set to every 4 hours and I have also done a manual sync, I don't notice any change on my phone.
I am a paid subscriber, but Etsy is behaving as if it is still in Alpha stage of development. Highly disappointed.
I am a paid subscriber, but Etsy is behaving as if it is still in Alpha stage of development. Highly disappointed.
Sorry to hear about your experience. Thousands of people have been using EteSync for over five years at this point, so it's very unlikely that there are such issues that went undetected.
I'm not saying that this is the case, but in 99.99% of the reports that we get it ends up being an error with some additional piece of software doing something funny.
As for the groups: have you imported from the etesync app or from simple contacts? There are conflicting ways to how to do groups in vcard and it could be that simple contacts is importing it in a way that isn't compatible with Android or EteSync.
Okay, I will try importing via Etesync web this time. Is there a way to quickly delete all the contacts from Etesync web? I deleted all the contacts from my phone and used the Etesync app to sync but Etesync web only deletes a few at a time. I re-sync and refresh the web page and only a few more contacts are deleted.
Nevermind, finally figured out how to delete the Contacts all at once by going to Etesync web, click on Contacts, then Edit, then Delete, and the Contacts Collection deleted. But then I could not figure out how to create a new collection on the Web. So I had to go to my phone and Create Address Book. Then I went back to the web to Import the Google VCF Contacts file and when I selected the file to Import I received the following error: "pim.etesync.com says An error has occurred, please contact developers." I have attempted to do this using both Brave browser and Firefox with the exact same results. My VPN is also disconnected to make sure that was not causing any issue. I also tried dragging and dropping as well as selecting the file via the file selection window. I also tried logging out and back in to the account to no avail!
You can create a new collection from the collection page on the web. Can you try importing this vcard file from Android? (we support import from file there too, and I think the library to parse vcard on Android is a bit better).
I attempted to Import the VCF from Android and in the beginning it said it was importing and that it could take awhile. After maybe 15 minutes it switched to "Import, Adding entries... 0%, 0/100"
After 3 hours the message remained the same (i.e. 0%, 0/100) and this is with an Internet connection with an average Upload speed of about 50 Mbps. Despite this I decided to leave the phone on over night. When the morning came the message disappeared and I was back at the main user account screen on the phone. I returned to the Contacts and I have a message which reads "Collection is empty. Maybe it's still syncing?"!
This has been an exasperating experience. At this point EteSync is not only useless to me, it is dangerously problematic as it has deleted entries (i.e. Contact Groups and Contacts) without permission and is unable to do a simple import directly from a Google VCF file. So much for recommending this to clients! I honestly can't remember the last time I encountered a beta or non-beta app this buggy. And the fact that EtesSync is meant to be relied upon for secure backup of my contacts and calendar makes its unreliability all the more egregious.
I'm now going to attempt the import on a different phone (Pixel 5) running the latest GrapheneOS. I'll keep you posted.
Okay, everything (2000+ contacts and 90 Contact groups) imported in less than 15 minutes without any errors on the Graphene phone. I uninstalled EteSync from the CalyxOS phone (to avoid syncing with it since it has proven a problem in the past) and will continue to test it out on Graphene and see if it proves reliable over the next couple weeks. If so it may point to some incompatibility with CalyxOS.
Well, now a new problem has emerged. After using EteSync on GrapheneOS to import the VCF file, everything appeared fine on the phone. But when I go to EteSync web client no Contact Groups are listed and only Contacts beginning with an A are listed (actually only a partial list of the A Contacts). In other words all 90 Contact groups are missing and over 90% of the Contacts are missing from the web client.
To see what would happen I did a manual sync from Etesync on the phone. It showed a syncing animation for a few minutes after which I went back to Etesync web and now it lists Contacts A through G. And still not a single Contact Group. However everything still looks fine on the phone.
Any idea what is going on?
After 12 hours all the Contacts look to have populated the EteSync web client, but I cannot be certain since I see no way of easily calculating the total number of Contacts residing on the web client. Is there any way to do so?
Furthermore, not a single Contact Group appears on the web client. Any ideas?