OVERSERVED

Contact recovery

Restore your contacts

If contacts you protected haven't come back, this page will get them back. Work through the steps in order. Most people are done at step 2.

Your contacts are still on your phone.

OverServed does not delete protected contacts. It moves them into an encrypted snapshot in the app's own private storage and puts them back when the lockdown ends. If the app was closed by the system, crashed, or was uninstalled before it finished, the snapshot is still there and the restore simply hasn't run yet. Your contact data never left your phone — it was never uploaded, so there is nothing to download back.

What happened

While OverServed is armed, protected contacts are removed from your phone's contact list so that nothing on the phone can reach them — not the dialer, not your messaging apps, not autocomplete. The original entries are held in an encrypted snapshot until the lockdown ends, then written back exactly as they were.

The restore step can be interrupted. Common causes: the app was force-stopped or uninstalled while armed, the phone ran out of storage, the battery died mid-restore, or the operating system killed the app in the background. When that happens, the snapshot survives but the write-back doesn't complete, and the contacts stay hidden until the app runs again.

Get them back

  1. Do not delete the app, and do not reset your phone

    If OverServed is still installed, leave it installed. The snapshot lives inside the app's private storage. Uninstalling it with the "also delete app data" option, clearing the app's storage, or factory-resetting the phone are the only actions that can actually destroy the snapshot. If you have already uninstalled it, go to step 2 — on most phones the data survives an ordinary uninstall for a short period, and reinstalling recovers it.

  2. Open the app (or reinstall it) and let it restore

    Launch OverServed. On startup it checks for an unfinished restore and, if it finds one, puts your contacts back automatically and shows you a confirmation with the number of contacts restored.

    If you uninstalled it: reinstall from Google Play using the same Google account on the same phone, then open it. Do not sign in with a different account — the snapshot is tied to the device, not to your account.

    Give it a moment. Restoring several hundred contacts can take up to a minute. Keep the screen on until it tells you it's finished.

  3. Run the restore by hand

    If nothing happened automatically, trigger it yourself in the app:

    • Settings → Protected contacts → Restore now
    • Choose Restore from last snapshot, or pick an earlier snapshot by date and time if you protected contacts on more than one night.
    • Confirm. The app will report how many contacts it wrote back.
    The app keeps the last several snapshots, not just the most recent one. If the newest snapshot restores fewer contacts than you expected, try the one before it — restoring twice is safe and does not create duplicates.

  4. Use your exported backup copy

    If you ever used Settings → Protected contacts → Export a backup copy, the app wrote a plain file to your phone's Downloads folder named overserved-contacts-backup-YYYY-MM-DD.vcf.

    You can import that file straight into your phone's own Contacts app without OverServed installed at all: open Contacts → Settings → Import → .vcf file and choose it from Downloads. That file is yours; it was written by you, stays on your device, and is not encrypted, so delete it once you're done if you'd rather not keep contact details sitting in Downloads.

  5. Use your phone's own contact history

    Independently of OverServed, Google keeps a change history for your contacts. If your contacts sync with a Google account, you can roll the whole address book back to how it looked before that night:

    • Go to contacts.google.com on any browser, signed in to the same Google account.
    • Open Settings (or the menu) and choose Undo changes.
    • Pick a point in time from before the night in question — the options go back 30 days.
    • Confirm, then let your phone sync.
    This restores every contact change made in that window, not just ours. If you deliberately added or edited contacts since then, those edits will be rolled back too.

  6. Email support and we'll walk you through it

    If you have worked through the steps above and contacts are still missing, contact us. A person will answer.

    Support

    support@overserved.app

    Include as much of this as you can. It lets us identify the exact failure without asking you a second round of questions:

    • Phone model and Android version.
    • The OverServed version number (Settings → About), if the app is still installed.
    • The date and roughly the time you armed it, and when you noticed contacts were missing.
    • Whether the app was uninstalled, force-stopped, or crashed, and whether the phone restarted.
    • Roughly how many contacts are missing, and whether it is all of them or only the ones you protected.
    • What the app said when you tried step 3, including any error text.
    • Whether your contacts sync with a Google account.
    Do not send us names or phone numbers. We do not have your contacts and we do not want them — we can only help you run the restore on your own device. Any contact details you send us we will delete.

If you need to reach someone right now

Emergency calls are never blocked by OverServed, whether it is armed, unarmed, or in a failed state. Dialing emergency services always works. Ride apps and maps are never blocked either.

To reach a specific person before the restore finishes, dial their number directly, or find them in your recent calls, your messaging app's history, your email, or contacts.google.com — OverServed only changes the contact list on your phone.

Do not factory-reset your phone to fix this.

A reset is the one action that permanently destroys the on-device snapshot. Nothing on this page requires it, and after a reset we cannot help you — we hold no copy of your contacts to restore from.

Where your contact data was, the whole time

On your phone. In app-private, encrypted storage that no other app and no person at OverServed can read. Your address book is never uploaded to us or to anyone else, which is why the recovery steps above all happen on your device rather than through your account.

The full detail is in the privacy policy.