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Message 1 of 6

All Digital Voice contacts have disappeared

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I've had problems trying to get my BT  basic digital phones to accept the new hub (replacement as original was faulty).  I think my husband had managed to sort that problem out, as I have been able to make a phone call a few minutes ago, but all the contacts I so painstakingly typed in when we first got the handsets have disappeared. Please can anyone advise how to retrieve them or get them back from wherever in cyberspace they have disappeared to? It took hours to type them all in the first time, and since then I've given the old landline handsets where I copied all the contacts from,  (these were for the copper telephone cable that we no longer use) away to a friend, having first wiped off our personal data, so I don't have an original any more that I can refer to.

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Message 2 of 6

Re: All Digital Voice contacts have disappeared

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Bad new I'm afraid. From my own experience a reset of phone when you connected to new hub and you have lost the contact list with no way back.  Unless the newer phone are different I was not able to import contacts from my mobile so had to re-input the information

hopefully this may change in the future phones



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Message 3 of 6

Re: All Digital Voice contacts have disappeared

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Thank you for taking the time to reply. I'm really surprised there isn't some digital backup or "cloud" or even a warning in the instructions that this will occur.

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Message 4 of 6

Re: All Digital Voice contacts have disappeared

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Hi @JennyRB 

Once you've re-entered your contacts, go to the hub manager in your browser (192.168.1.254). Then click on your phone number and you'll see a Contacts tab. Click on this and you can export your contacts as a .vcf file. 

Do this every time you add/modify contacts and if you lose them again, they can just be loaded back up the same was as you exported them. It doesn't help you now but it's worth remembering for the future.

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Message 5 of 6

Re: All Digital Voice contacts have disappeared

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Thank you so much for taking the time to explain. I've printed your answer so I've got it to hand. 😀

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Message 6 of 6

Re: All Digital Voice contacts have disappeared

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Constructive (hopefully) Feedback to BT DV team

When I saw that BT DV would include the ability to import and export contact lists via the SH2 (with up to 500 entries) I had assumed this would work in a way that was similar to how contact lists work (and have for many years) on mobile devices.  I quickly realised that this wasn't the case.

  • First disappointment:  Contact list files can only be added in .vcf format.  Virtually every contact management application out there as a minimum will import .vcf and .csv files, and in this case as the only data fields required are First Name, Last Name and the phone number it isn't exactly a massive challenge.
  • Second disappointment:  As far as I can tell, importing contacts from a file overwrites (as opposed to appends to) the existing contact list on the handsets.  No warning appears, so beware of uploading the wrong contacts file (and keep a back-up).
  • Third disappointment:  I travel abroad quite a lot, and (I suspect like many others) I maintain my contact 'phone numbers in "full" International format, with the standard international dialling prefix "+", the country code, the local/city code and the number - I could be in any country and be calling any other country).  However when these numbers are imported the "+" prefix is stripped-out and all of the phone numbers fail because they all now begin with a two-digit country code (as opposed to the UK "00" international dialling prefix).

I've now managed to import a file that works.  All(!) I had to do was:

  1. Export from my primary Google Contacts list three individual .VCF files (Family, Friends, Personal); fortunately these groups were already set up in Google Contacts or I'd have had to hunt through and manually select about 300 contacts from a total of well over 1000.
  2. Use Terminal on my Mac to enter a command line to combine the three .VCF files into one single .VCF file (an "append" option would avoid this step - I could have just added each file in turn).
  3. Use TextEdit on my Mac to run a find-and-replace and swap the "+" for a "00".
  4. Import the file (the easy bit) and check it's loaded onto the handsets (yes, and very quickly).

Having loaded the file, it works fine, but a further disappointment was the poor search functionality.

  • The contact list displays in alphabetical order, by First Name, Last Name - I couldn't find an option to change the list to Last Name, First Name.
  • Using the keypad to enter a search string only works  in terms of the first keystroke taking you to the first name in the list starting with that letter, the second keystroke takes you to the first name beginning with your first and second keystrokes, and so on.  Would it be that difficult to have the entered search string bring up all entries containing that string?

Maybe most people don't need this level of functionality, but it's pretty basic technology.  Maybe most people don't have as many contacts as me, but if it's advertised as having that capacity it sets an expectation that it can deal with it.

I don't expect to use the Contact List "Export" function because I don't know what use the exported version would be.  I'd have to change "00" back to "+", but only where "00" is the first two digits in the contact number.

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