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Help How to backup favorites and contacts?

your contacts are already backed-up. They're in your gmail account now. As long as you keep your contacts synced, this won't be an issue.

my first g1 had a problem with the screen and eventually had to be replaced when it got stuck in landscape mode. I downloaded MyBackup to backup settings. When I got the new phone, and signed in, all my contacts, gmail, and calendar items downloaded from the network automatically. Using MyBackup my new phone was 90% the way I wanted it. I've noticed a few things do not back up.


- Applications.
If you have to do a factory reset on your phone, when you open the market and go to My Downloads, all the Apps you had on your phone right before the factory reset are listed and you can download them again easily. You must download them all at one sitting, as if you close the market and return, the list will have updated and anything that wasn't downloaded will no longer be on the list.

However, if you switch handsets, your My Downloads in the marketplace is empty. it appears the market isn't tied to your google account, but rather tied to the handset.

-Contact Ringtones.
When you assign a ringtone to a person, this is NOT backed up anywhere. Not in google, and it appears MyBackup didn't record this setting either. So I had to go through and assign those tones again. Luckily only a few people have special ringtones, but still, it was a pain.

-Favorites.
None were saved. I believe if you download the Opera browser, there is a way to sync them, either that or there was an app that imports your desktop favorites to the G1, but don't know the name.

-Folders.
Mybackup restored the home screen folders, with names, but the folders themselves were empty. All other shortcuts were restored correctly.


MyBackup and the Google sync made it less of a pain, but as far as I can tell there doesn't appear to be anything that synca/backs up everything. There will be some tinkering needed to get everything back the way you want it.
 
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Hey,

Don't want to spam, but have you checked out the new FREE m:IQ app put out by Best Buy? I think this could be the best solution to you contact problem!

m:IQ helps users sync their contacts, text messages, calendar events, calls, photos, videos, and internet favorites from their Android phones to their private web-based m:IQ account. Once backed-up in the cloud, users can interact with their information in exciting new ways, send and receive text messages, share their experiences with friends and social sites, and easily restore their content when moving from one phone to the next. Content instantly transfers between the phone and the web without requiring any user interaction - ensuring that users are always backed-up and have access to
their information.

You can go to miqlive.com to scope it out and download...

Hope you guys check it out and it helps!
 
Upvote 0
Hey,

Don't want to spam, but have you checked out the new FREE m:IQ app put out by Best Buy? I think this could be the best solution to you contact problem!

m:IQ helps users sync their contacts, text messages, calendar events, calls, photos, videos, and internet favorites from their Android phones to their private web-based m:IQ account. Once backed-up in the cloud, users can interact with their information in exciting new ways, send and receive text messages, share their experiences with friends and social sites, and easily restore their content when moving from one phone to the next. Content instantly transfers between the phone and the web without requiring any user interaction - ensuring that users are always backed-up and have access to
their information.

You can go to miqlive.com to scope it out and download...

Hope you guys check it out and it helps!

How do you get the information back in your phone if you need to? I've never been able to figure that one out and they won't respond to my emails.
 
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Froyo contacts has an import/export feature that will back up your contacts to a .vcf file on your SD card. From there you can transfer to your computer and backup to CD/DVD for later restore if needed. It does all your contacts, phone and gmail. The .vcf file is just text, so you can view it or edit it with a text editor and that's great. It also saves your contact photos (it uses text to encode the photo) and that's cool. This would seem to be the answer to the OP's question.

A further question would be how to use the .vcf file in useful ways, like importing to Outlook contacts or importing to Microsoft Access so that you can manipulate the data for export to your next wiz-bang phone. I'd like to know the answer to that question...that's why I'm here.

Punkzanyi & Carnivex suggest that the phone automatically backs up to gmail, but I think the consensus, my observations, and Carnivex's opinion are that that's only for the Gmail contacts on the phone. What good that is I couldn't tell you. Carnivex is the kind of simplistic user that is so frustrating to talk to, they give useless answers to problems because they don't think very deeply and don't use much of the device. Carnivex, the OP specified "manually typed in," so what good is it to remind him that gmail contacts are backed up to Google? Gmail contacts aren't manually type in to the phone. If anyone knows of a way that ALL contacts get backed up to Google (and anything less than that is totally useless), I'd like to hear about it.
 
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Carnivex is the kind of simplistic user that is so frustrating to talk to, they give useless answers to problems because they don't think very deeply and don't use much of the device. Carnivex, the OP specified "manually typed in," so what good is it to remind him that gmail contacts are backed up to Google? Gmail contacts aren't manually type in to the phone. If anyone knows of a way that ALL contacts get backed up to Google (and anything less than that is totally useless), I'd like to hear about it.

I resent that comment about me being simplistic. I would rather you actually decided to get to know me before posting "random" comments about me that is in fact far from the actual truth!.

AND "Manually typed in" contacts gets ported to google too, provided you select the contact type as "Google Contact" and are not as unobservant as not to realise the phone generally defaults to "Phone Contacts" ;). You can however make the phone default to Google Contacts as the general kind of contacts to make rather then phone contacts.

I personally did that, as I was personally fed up with having to do manual backups once in a while, as well as having to backup/restore contacts every time I swapped phones. Now its just a matter of setting up my Google Account on the new android phone and hey presto in 2 mins tops I have all my contacts and what not on my phone.....

Its not being simplistic, its about seeing the clever things you can do with the things at hand and implement them so you can work smarter and NOT harder ;). Having to do backups munally is prone to getting missed and thus loss of contacts can occur :).

Oh and a finishing note, any present contact on the phone can be changed into a Google Contact after having been created. Mind you you get a popup stating that you "might" lose some of the information, but so far as I have seen I haven't actually lost any contact information doing that, yet...
 
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I resent that comment about me being simplistic. I would rather you actually decided to get to know me before posting "random" comments about me that is in fact far from the actual truth!.

Oh and a finishing note, any present contact on the phone can be changed into a Google Contact after having been created. Mind you you get a popup stating that you "might" lose some of the information, but so far as I have seen I haven't actually lost any contact information doing that, yet...
Hey Carnivex, it's me again: Since adopting your advice and keeping my contacts as "Google" contacts I've been frustrated by a problem: You can't use the phone's "Groups" on your "Google" contacts. Also if you have assigned any of your phone's contacts to groups, that is one piece of the data that you will lose when you convert to a google contact. It's so frustrating when the phone divides your contacts that way. I used to have that same problem with my SIM card, contacts that were "SIM" contacts only got a small subset of fields, "phone" contacts got a larger one, like being able to store a photo. It's another example of how primitive and feature-poor most software is. We shouldn't have to worry about all that. I have a list of contacts, I want them in groups, I want them backed up on Google, all of that should just happen seamlessly without me having to jump through a bunch of arcane hoops. In the case of the SIM (on my old Motorola Razor), the phone should keep a link and if I want a contact on the SIM then fine, and if I want a photo on that contact, then fine, it stores the contact in the phone and links the two entries so they appear as one. Phone groups are useful when I just want to view a subset of contacts like "stores" or "restaurants." Also they are useful when sending out a text message to a group.
 
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