Question

❗️LOST DATA - Google Contacts overwritten

  • 13 March 2023
  • 2 replies
  • 31 views
C

I have a very sticky situation on my hands, and I’m hoping someone here might have sage advice. 

It looks as though Copper has been overwriting Google Contacts, resulting in the loss of hundreds of phone numbers from my colleague’s Android phone. 

At first, I thought it was a bug, as I don’t recall any warning about this in my onboarding. However, after chatting with support, it seems like this was avoidable with the proper guidance. Yes, here I am. 

Is there any way to retrieve what was lost or otherwise resolve this issue? 

Any help would be greatly appreciated as the loss of this data would be catastrophic. 

2 replies

alex
Userlevel 5
Badge +3

So if you have Copper's 1-Way Google Contacts sync enabled, it'll create a label within your Google Contacts called "Copper" and add all the contacts to your Google Contacts.

Since it's a 1-way sync, and major changes in Copper will overwrite them back into Google Contacts.

Editing any contact that has the Copper tag within Google Contacts is not going to sync the changes back to Copper, and like you said, may get overridden.

You can see if there's an audit log in Google Contacts (not sure what logs they keep), and maybe you can see the info there.

Or in some instances, duplicate contacts might exist within Google Contacts (if they were in your contact book before being synced by Copper), and in that case, the data might exist in the other record.

All-in-all, if you have a CRM like Copper, your Work Google Contacts is not really meant to be a place you update. The single source of truth is Copper, and thus, Copper will overwrite these other areas.

If it looks like you lost the info though, you likely did, and any recovery is going to take place with Google Workspace (Google Contacts) and not Copper, since Copper never got any of the changes made to Google Contacts.

Alex (efficient.app)
C

@alex, thank you for your response.

I never expected Copper to grab details from Google Contacts; however, I also didn’t expect Copper to overwrite and effectively delete details from already-existing Google Contacts, which is what seems to have happened.

As much as I understand that Copper can’t recover Google Contacts info, I was pretty shocked to find that this loss of information could happen as it’s not a risk that I’ve been alerted to—despite going through the onboarding program. I also don’t really see this described in any help material that I’ve been able to find.

Reply


Terms & ConditionsCookie settings