We’ve all been there: you’ve lost your phone and with it, all of your contacts. You could ask your friends to direct message you their phone numbers on social media, but it’s always a gamble of who will actually get back to you.
So, when texts come in or you get the odd phone call, what do you do when you don’t recognize the number? Do you leave your friends on reading? Do you send your calls straight to voicemail? You shouldn’t — there’s a different and much better way to track down a phone number.
When you’ve lost your contacts
You’ve likely spent years building up your contact list. In all likelihood, you still have numbers in your phone from highschool. So when you break your phone and lose all of your precious contacts in one fell swoop, it can feel pretty devastating.
The first solution to restoring your lost phonebook is basic phone repair. It seems like a logical first step to take, yet in today’s throw-away culture, it can be easy to forget that the easiest way to restore your lost contacts is to simply Google “phone repair near me” and see what comes up.
A skilled phone repair person can help bring life back to phones that have been dropped in toilets (it happens to the best of us), broken on the sidewalk, or even overheated by a particularly sunny day at the beach. In some cases, it may be simply that your screen is shattered but the phone’s hardware itself is still in fairly good shape.
With a new screen and a protective layer of Gorilla Glass, you can rest assured that all of your photos, data, and phone numbers are still accessible and secure.
When you need to find out who’s calling you
We live in an age in which our phone numbers are made available and sold to telemarketers, salespeople, and fundraisers. Not to mention the fact that our phone numbers are linked to all of our social media accounts, and public accounts can make our phone numbers public as well.
Even if you think you’re on the National Do Not Call Registry, your number is out there and you need to be able to know who is calling you and whether they’re your friend or a salesperson. So you should know how to reverse phone look-up. The easiest way to do that is to use a lookup site to do the research.
All you have to do is input the phone number in question in the search bar and you’ll have access to the phone owner’s phone activity, email information, court records, criminal records, and more. In some cases, a reverse phone lookup can help you find a phone number’s related social media accounts as well.
This can come in handy, especially when your friends are trying to reach you or when you’re doing a quick Google search on a Tinder match or potential date.
How to prevent contact loss in the future
As careful as you may be after breaking your phone, even the most careful phone owner may be subject to clumsiness. You wouldn’t want to lose all of your contacts yet again.
For the future, make sure to back up your contacts in the cloud. If you have an iPhone, this type of backup is easy, as your device will have a “Sync Contacts” options. Connect your iPhone to your computer and launch iTunes. When your device appears in your computer’s menu, select it and click on the “Info” tab. Then, sync your contacts.
Your contacts will be updated and backed up in your iTunes account. If you have an Android, you can easily back up your contacts to your Google account.
