Transfer contacts from a dead screen

[AlanWalters]

Trying again!......... I have a Vodafone Prime 6 which has a dead screen (I dropped the phone). How can I get the contacts transferred onto my Prime 7.

The Red Box in-store solution can't work because "you need to be able to see the screen"

Any ideas, folks???

Thanks,

Alan 

[hrym]

Are your contacts not on Google, and would therefore reappear as soon as you log in on another device?   And, I have to ask, if not, why not?   Syncing in this way makes then non device-dependent and this problem simply won't arise.

I don't know exactly how the Red Box works, but it's possible that you need to authorise a connection (on the phone) to an external device, which would mean interacting with the screen.   It may also be necessary to unlock it, which als requires that.  

Contacts are generally not stored in a straightforwardly readable form, so accessing the phone via a cable and pc (if you can) probably isn't going to help.   In the (I fear unlikely) event that you can, you'll need to look at the hidden, and possibly protected, areas - again, if you can get at them.

For the future, keep your contacts on Google and also back them up periodically.   In the Contacts app menu, there should be an option to export (it's often under Manage Contacts).  This should produce a vCard file you can upload to cloud storage and then copy elsewhere.   Your contacts are precious, so the more copies you have, the better.

[AlanWalters]

Hey, thanks for that. Much appreciated.  I think is going to be a lesson learnt!

[jeffkinn]

There will no doubt be specialist places or software that could extract the contacts from the folders that you can still access via a computer. But storing any data only on a mobile device is a very bad policy. There are multiple ways of copying information to an external service and this may well be a tough lesson for you.

[jeffkinn]

I just googled extract Android contacts and got a lot of results. I've no idea if they require interaction from the phone screen but you could easily do the research to find out. Good luck.