ROM update and MyBackup Pro contact syncing problem

[wuxia]

Dear Android Community,
I'm hoping there is somebody out here that can help. Please let me explain my problem:
Yesterday I decided to update the ROM on my unbranded HTC Hero. I did my research and used MyBackup Pro to back up all data and apps. Next, I installed the new ROM, restored everything from the backups I made and restarted my phone. So far, so good.
Then I took a look at my contacts. Instead of some being google contacts and some being phone contacts, they all turned to google contacts!
My google contacts are not very organized: lot's just an e-mail address (hundreds of "unnamed" contacts), and a lot of my contacts have multiple e-mail addresses and show as different entries. So now I have three John's and five Mary's instead of one. Only one of those contains the phone numbers associated with that person.
So, like with the old firmware, I tried to show just the phone contacts and hide the google contacts. The function to hide the google contacts has disappeared! So now I'm stuck seeing hundreds of double contacts that are only "google". There seems to be no way in the phone to change a contact from being "google" to being "phone". So there are my first questions:
How can I change my contacts from "google" to "phone"? (even if this works I have to redo changing all from one name to first and last as google doesn't make this differentiation)
How can I get the function back to hide the google contacts? (prevously, press "menu", "view", deselect "google".

In an attempt to find another solution and maybe just organize my contacts in google, I tried to sync my contacts. It said there were too many deletes, and as I was syncing and I had a backup anyway, I pressed "proceed deleting". Then I got the error "The process android.process.acore has stopped unexpectedly. Please try again" and it force closes.
Contacts seem the same in my phone, so now I go to gmail. All my contacts in gmail have been deleted spare 10! I tried to sync again a couple of times but got the same error every time. The sync process doesn't work anymore. So there is my next question:
Does anybody have the same problem, and were you able to sync your contacts back to gmail eventually?
Really getting a little desperate here and hoping somebody can help.

[deserttopping]

Mybackup should have warned you about backing up contacts. Basically, do not do it, it's unnecessary. I did it once and, yes, i had duplicates of all my contacts.

You might try adding a bogus contact on your phone and then resyncing from phone, if your contacts still appear on your phone. Anyway, they should be in a folder on your sd card. Check "rerware." You should be able to import to gmail.

[wuxia]

I took a quick look at the rerware folder and unzipped the data backup. It seems to be a file without extension, and currently I'm not really sure what to do with it, but I'll research it and will try to import back into my google contacts that way.
Still don't understand why I can not turn off seeing google contacts in my phone like previously. Very annoying, as even if I re-import the names and numbers from my old phone (as to get them back as phone contacts instead of google contacts), I'm still stuck with all the superfluous contacts in the list.
And even if I'm able to import into google again from the rerware backup, and I edit all my contacts in google to make sense, I can not sync!!
Grrr...this drives me nuts!

[deserttopping]

Just do a factory reset once you figure out that backup file.

[wuxia]

So I figured that since all my contacts are in my phone now, it would be easiest to make a CSV file from my phone contacts, and import that one into gmail again.
I downloaded Exportcontacts to this task. All seemed to go fine, until I discovered that it only exported my contacts up to the letter M!!
A few tries later it got down to Z, but start loosing the phonenumbers around R, and looses e-mail addresses in the beginning of the list!!
Who knows another good program to export my contacts to CSV?

[JulzFromSprite]

Hi Guys,

A shameless plug from an Android Backup development team member,

Android Backup restore phone contacts fine on HTC devices, that is without the dreaded google flag

We also work well with Google/exchange/htc sync, and don't screw them up, but still bringing back contacts for your phone.

You can find us here
http://www.spritesoftware.com/products/android

Getting Started manual
http://www.spritesoftware.com/support/tutorials/Android-Backup/Getting-Started

We also backup most of your HTC specific content, have a look at our guide, and we can actually restore it :-)

Please also note, we have a big build out tomorrow with even more content, for example Calendar backup (sync and non sync)

Many thanks

Julian

[Rainier Wolfcastle]

I'm glad I only paid $.99 for Sprite Backup, because it does not restore Group membership information, so it is utterly useless. My wife will, once we get through this ongoing living broken sync hell, sync only the System Group: My Contacts. She does not sync "All Contacts" because that brings down ~3000 useless contacts scraped by gmail.

I verified that all of her contacts were in the My Contacts group, backed up with Sprite Backup, restored, and now all of her groups are empty.

Mybackup apparently has issues w/Google sync on restore (although I haven't yet found out what those issues are), but at least it restores group info correctly.