Help Does anyone manage to keep their work and personal contacts separate?

I just do it like this:
I have 4 Google accounts on this phone (but no Exchange). 2 accounts are for business, 2 are for personal. The contacts get mixed together on the phone, but it doesn't much matter. I can view or edit each account's contact list separately. I have no problem keeping everything neat and organized.

I'm able to view each account list, separately, combined or in a custom view by tapping Menu > Contacts to display and selecting the desired account.

What is it about this method that's unsatisfactory?

BTW the option to save contacts to SIM cards is disappearing and no doubt will be gone completely in a year or two. Unlike other contacts options, SIM contacts can have names and numbers only - no email addresses, physical addresses, photos, birthdays, notes - none of the extra information most people like to be able to add.

Not only that, but SIM cards themselves are going away. Most of the major players in smartphone have already had meetings to get together on SIM-free phone standards.

In short, SIM contacts is old, outdated technology that should not be considered a viable option.

All that said, I *highly, strongly, urgently* recommend saving contacts to your Google account for instant backup and easy transfer or restoration. If not, don't forget to do .vcf backups!

Saving to sd is simple: use the import/export option in the contacts app to write them to a vcard file.

SIM contacts are too limited for most people: they consist of one name plus one number, no other information (though if you define multiple contacts with the same name the phone will present them to you as one contact with multiple numbers).

I've never used exchange (the IT systems I use at work are all linux), so no experience of that I'm afraid.

Unlinking the Exchange account contacts should keep them separate, but I've never personally used Exchange so I can't positively confirm how Exchange stuff works. But if they are separated from the Google Contacts, they will not be synced to your Google account. Only contacts saved to a Google account will sync to Google. We're not concerned with Exchange contacts since those should be backed up on the Exchange server.

I can confirm that on our devices each of the 4 Google accounts sync separately, even though I can open the Contacts app, choose All and view all 4 account's contacts together. I assume your Exchange contacts behave the same way.

So, in Settings > Accounts > Google > Enable Contacts sync. That should upload contacts that have been saved to your Google account on the phone.

Then on the phone, temporarily disable contacts sync so it's not trying to sync while you make the changes you're about to do.

If none of the contacts have been saved to your Google account, IOW only to the phone and not associated with any Google açcount, to get them into Google export the contacts as a .vcf file and using a computer or the phone browser, log into Gmail online and import the .vcf file to the main account's contacts.

If you have another, additional Google account on the phone and you want to merge the contacts into a single account, then as above export the secondary account's contacts as a .vcf file and import the .vcf file to the main account's contacts.

As for the SIM contacts, export them (you will use .csv for this) and again as above, import them to the main account.

Once you have all the contacts you want combined imported into the main account, click on 'More' then 'Find and merge duplicates'. You should now have a consolidated master list of all your non-Exchange contacts.

Re-enable contacts sync for the main Google account on the phone and everything should sync up.

From now on, save contacts you want in this Master list to that account and you have instant, automatic backups. If you need to restore or transfer contacts all you need do is resync to the new device. If you accidentally delete all contacts or otherwise foul up the list, you can easily restore the list to as it was anytime in the last 30 days.

There should be an option in the email client to disable automatically adding new email contacts.

dylane said:

Thanks very much for the detailed write up. So it seems to me first thing I would do is temporarily disable the Exchange account and then delete everything off of the phone memory (but not the SIM card). Then login into Gmail via the web, delete all the contacts I have in Gmail and disable adding any new email contacts.

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If you do that you lose all contacts except Exchange and SIM contacts. Unless you save them as .vcf first. Just be sure you think this through and don't lose anything. I don't see the point in deleting all the contacts to Gmail, but I can understand clearing contacts in the phone, just so it starts over fresh when you sync the fiñal Master list.

Once that's done I go back to the phone and use my SIM Contacts app to copy the SIM card contacts back to local memory (since they aren't otherwise recognized so I have no way to do a direct export to CSV). At this point I should only have phone contacts on my phone.

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From what you said so far, you would only have the SIM contacts on the phone, imported from the SIM.
The phone has no option to export directly from the SIM to .csv? That's kinda odd...

Then I export those contacts either as a .vcf or csv and put that file on my computer, login to Gmail and import the file. When I do this Google won't automatically find and merge duplicates right?

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Not automatically, if I remember right.

One of the problems I've had with syncing in the past is that Google has decided to merge different contacts with the same name into one contact, and I want to make sure that doesn't happen this time.. I'm OK manually going through and merging and/or deleting contacts. So once that's all done I'll turn on syncing and Gmail won't flip out and decide to duplicate all the contacts that are now on both my phone and in Gmail?

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It shouldn't, no.

Is there a way to tell Gmail to always use the phone as the master version in case there are any conflicts? I don't plan on being logged into Google all the time. Once this is setup I'll delete the account and only enable it again when I want to sync or download something from the store.

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The phone will sync with Gmail online. Online and phone contacts will stay identical 'Master' contacts. Changes to either will appear in the other. I strongly advise you to leave contacts sync enabled!. You can always disable sync for other stuff.
DO NOT delete the account!!! You can't just re-enable a deleted account!

1. Just wanted to be sure you understood exactly what would happen.

2. Remember, SIM contacts are name and number only, and will likely be gone in a couple of years, even from dunb phones.

3.Because there's no real reason not to leave sync on.

4. No need to go through all that. You can just log off.

dylane said:

Thanks again for all the info. I think we're mostly understood, but I'm curious about this last one. Where in the phone would I log off from all Google services?

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Good question. I've never worried about it. I thought I remembered seeing it in Settings > Accounts > Menu but the only thing there is a checkbox for 'Auto-sync data'. A sorta one-stop spot for disabling all sync I suppose.

So I'm digging around, thinking it's gotta be here somewhere, when I realize - it's not here because there's no point in logging out! I never log out. I never need to log out. If I did log out, several things would fail to function. So why should there be a log out function? I'd only need to log in again. Makes perfect sense to me.