Device Tracker Created new entries

So I ran into an issue on my server and had to delete my home-assistant_v2.db file.

Now that I have things back up and running HA has assigned a new ID inside HA for our mobile devices. Nothing on the actual devices has changed, nor how they connect to the MQTT broker, or the broker itself.

Before my phone was identified in HA as: device_tracker.me_mycell.
Now my phone is identified in HA as: device_tracker.hass_mycell2
(there is a device_tracker.hass_mycell but I don’t know why).

Why and How did this happen?
How do I stop this from happening?
How do I get this device back to it’s proper ID?

remove the old unused entity_id from the entity_registry and restart.