One annoying thing you must have noticed if you ever restored your handset to factory settings or installed a new firmware, is that when you synchronize your device back with your computer (via PC Suite or iSync) to get back your information, you get back your Contacts but not your Contact Groups. A few months ago, I discovered a method that allowed me to easily get back my groups and I mentioned it during my review of Group Creator. But I never wrote a detailed step-by-step guide, something that came back to me yesterday while reading Ricky’s explanation of the usefulness of Contact Groups. So here is my tutorial on recovering groups after a format or a firmware update.
Step 1 – Organizing your Contacts
Go to the Contacts application and go through the contacts that you would eventually want to include in certain groups. Edit each contact individually by adding a Note field in which you put the name of the group that you’d like them to belong to. Let’s say for example that there are 4 friends in your gang, that you usually mass-SMS together. You can edit each contact by adding a Note field that says “The Gang”. The same applies for your Work contacts, your family,… You need to do this for all the contacts that you want to group, no matter the number or name of the Groups. The process is tedious, but you only need to do it once, and this is the beauty of this method; after that, it’s just a few clicks each time you want your Groups back.
Step 2 – Creating groups
Now that your contacts are organized, you need to download and install Group Creator. The application is developed by Mattias Danielsson, and is a signed freeware but we encourage you to make a donation to Mattias, as a token of appreciation for his effort.
After installing Group Creator, run it. Go to Settings, and in “Group by Rule” select “Note”. Leave the minimum group size to 1 if you want, or up it to 2 if you think you have sparse and individual Notes in your Contacts that don’t need to form Groups of their own. Now click Back, and select Options then Group Contacts. You will see a “Grouping Contacts” progress bar and at the end, you will get a window telling you how many Contacts with a valable Notes field were found and how many groups were created.
Now you can launch your Contacts application, navigate right, and you have all your groups, like you want them to be. If you marked several friends by the note “The Gang”, you will find a new Group called “The Gang” which contains all these contacts.
Step 3 – Synchronizing the data before formatting or upgrading the firmware
In order for your groups to be retained, you need to synchronize your newly edited Contacts. If you’re on the PC, you might need to do this with PC Suite or Ovi Suite; if you’re on the Mac, you can use iSync. You can also use the new over-the-air Sync on Ovi, or if you like to be a bit exotic, you might use the Switch application like I do since I have the luxury of owning two S60 devices. In all cases, your Contacts information with the new Notes fields (as well as the Calendar and other info) will be backed up before your format or firmware update.
Step 4 – Getting back your groups after formatting or updating the firmware
First, you need to sync back the data that you backed up (to your computer, over the air or to another S60 handset). After getting back your Contacts, simply install Group Creator, and run it with the same procedure as in Step 2. And Voilà! You have your groups back, safe and sound!
It’s true that the first step might seem a bit hard to get to, but after you’ve finished it, it takes less than a minute to transfer Group Creator to your handset, install it, run it and create groups by Notes, so it’s a rather easy method and I use it very frequently since I restore my handsets to factory settings every now and then, and lose my Groups each time.
Of course, we’d appreciate it more if S60 had this feature built-in, but we’re always ready to find workarounds, and this is the beauty of S60, ain’t it?
