Backing Up And Restoring Contacts On Android Device

Losing the contacts on your phone could be a nightmare. Like literally. Imagine you are stuck in difficult situation and urgently need an advice from your best friend, but your phone, without your contacts, is as good as nothing. To prevent such a situation, backup your SIM contacts regularly.

Or if you love changing phones every now and then, you can easily transfer your contacts to the new phone through a backup. Imagine manually adding each contact; a nightmare, isn’t it. Thanks to technology that we now have super easy ways for doing these things.

Backing up and Restoring Contacts on Android Device 1

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1 Backup of Contacts using Google Account:

2 Syncing Contacts to Google Account:

3 Restoring Contacts from Google Account:

4 Automatic Backup:

Backup of Contacts using Google Account:

Keeping a back up of your contacts is very important, and considering how easily it can be done, you shouldn’t skip on it, especially if you want to spare yourself from the nightmare of losing and important phone number or email address.

Creating a back up of your Android contacts using your Google account is as easy as anything. Following are the steps:

Go to ‘Contacts’ or the ‘People’ app.

Open the menu by clicking on the three buttons either on top or bottom corner.
Choose ‘Manage Contacts’ from the menu.
Click on ‘Import/Export Contacts’.

Now tap ‘Import from Sim Card’. This will copy all the contacts that are currently stored in your phone.
If you have signed in to more than one Google account, your phone will ask which account you want to copy the contacts to.
If you haven’t signed in to any account, you will be asked to sign in to a new Google account.

Enter your id and password to sign in to your account.
You will see a window that says, ‘Reading from SIM card’.
And you’re done. All your contacts have been backed up to your account.

Syncing Contacts to Google Account:

An alternate method to do the same is as follows:

Go the ‘Settings’ option on your home screen.
Click on ‘Accounts and Sync’ option.

Select ‘Auto Sync’.
You will see a list of options for backing up your phone.
Select ‘Google’ and then choose the account you want to create back up on.

You will see a list of items that you can back up, including Calendar, App Data, Google Photos, etc.
Select the checkbox right next to ‘Contacts’.
This way all your contacts get backed up automatically.

Restoring Contacts from Google Account:

Now let’s say you are changing your phone. From your old phone, you created a backup of your contacts to your google account by using either of the above mentioned ways. The next step now is to copy these contacts to your new phone. This too is as simple as anything. Following are the easy peasy steps:

Go to ‘Contacts’ or the ‘People’ app.
Open the menu by clicking on the three buttons either on top or bottom corner.

Choose ‘Manage Contacts’ from the menu.
Click on ‘Copy Contacts’.
You will be asked where do you want to copy the contacts from.

Select the Google account which you used to create back up of your accounts.
Now you will be asked where do you want to copy the contacts to.
Choose the option ‘Phone’.

All your contacts will now be copied from your google account to your new phone.

Automatic Backup:

The first time you set up your google account on a device, you will be asked if you want to automatically back up your data. This setting can be changed any time, as easily as anything.

Go the ‘Settings’ option on your home screen.

Click on ‘System’ option.
Now click on ‘Backup’.
Now select the checkbox ‘Backup to google drive’.