How do I backup my contacts?

[ZingXao]

I don't have any contacts on my SIM card, they're all on my phone. I wanted to export them to my SIM so that when I get a new phone I can do a a quick and easy transfer, but it says that some data will be deleted.

So I thought I'd try contacts.google.com, logged in and none of my contacts are there, even though sync is on on my phone.

What should I do? How come they're not in the cloud?

Alright, so I dunno what I did lol. I emailed all the contacts to myself from my phone, downloaded them on to my Mac and added them to the address book. I then synced them with my Google account, so I can access them via my Google account at least. How do I go about getting them from there on to my phone?

 

[ZingXao]

EDIT: Okay, so I can access them by enabling my phone to read the contacts from my Google account. I just don't know why it didn't sync my contacts automatically from my phone to the Google account? As it stands, my Google account is synced to my Mac's address book. My phone is then linked to my Google account. How do I go about making the contacts actually SAVED on to my phone?

Thanks.

Whoops. Thought I hit edit. Sorry.

 

[chanchan05]

The problem is that you are saving the contacts to "phone", which basically means "phone only". Saving to Google on your phone does not mean that the phone is retrieving the contacts from Google Contacts. It means the contacts are saved on your phone and the phone sends copies to Google servers to store on Google Contacts. Even if you disconnected your phone from the internet, your Google Contacts are still there in your phone. That's also the reason why the contacts on your phone did not sync to the cloud, becaus by storing to "phone" and not your "google account", the sync cannot access them. The phone storage was designed for those paranoid people who don't want to have s storage of their contacts on the cloud servers.

From what I understand, you now have all your contacts in Google Contacts, by putting it there manually? What you now do is on your phone, go to contacts>menu>settings>display>and enable your Google account (the menu string may vary). The phone will automatically download your contacts to show. You might as well also disable the display of phone contacts to avoid "double entries".

Everytime you own get a new phone, simply factory reset the old one and log in to Google on the new one, and all your contacts will automatically be downloaded.

 

[VincentAnoid]

Or you could simply send them over via bluetooth.

 

[psyxologos]

my phone explorer. free app from the market. Brilliant!