How to Backup & Sync Contacts on your Android Phone

Contacts on your smartphone are probably one of the most important things you have there. Most of the people these days don’t even remember anyone’s phone number, they just have it saved on their phones in a contact. In a case where you lost your phone, or it broke, you wouldn’t want your contacts to be lost. Just because of this, I recommend that you take a backup of your contacts and even sync them to the cloud.

Today, I’ll tell you two different ways to backup and sync your contacts from your Android Smartphone. One of the ways would tell you how you can manually backup all the contacts and have them as a backup and the other way would be to directly sync them with your Google Account so you don’t have to worry about making a copy of your contacts.

Manually Backup your Android Phone Contacts

The most common way to backup your contacts used to be the manual backup, which allowed you to manually save all your contacts in a single file on your computer or your phone and access it later whenever you need it. Let’s see how to perform this type of a backup.

• On your phone, open the Contacts app
  
  
• From the menu there, choose Import/Export
  
• Now, from the options that you have, choose “Export to .vcf file”
  
• If your phone asks where you want to save it, tell it the location otherwise, it will just save it in the default location and tell you where it saved it.
  
• Now, wait for it to save your contacts in a single file. You can check the progress in the notification panel by dropping it down
  
  
• When it’s done, you can use your favorite file manager, I use ES File Explorer and browse for the file you just saved.
• Then, you can copy this to your computer or email it to yourself for future reference.

Pro Tip: Import these contacts into Gmail

Now if you’ve backed up all the contacts in a single file and you have them on your computer, you can actually import all of them into Gmail, which will sync them as your contacts on every phone or device that you have sync enabled with. To do so, follow these steps.

• Open Gmail on your computer and from the top right, where it says Gmail, choose Contacts from the drop-down menu.
  
• Now, on the Contacts page that opens up, click on More on the left menu and choose Import. If you’re using the older version of Contacts, you can click on More in the top menu bar and choose Import there.
  
  
• In the popup dialog, choose “CSV or vCard File” and then it will take you to the older contacts page if you are not already there. Here, choose More from the top toolbar and click on Import.
• Browse for the file you had just backed up and click on Import. You will have successfully imported all your contacts into Gmail.
  
  

Automatically Sync your Contacts With Google from Android

Another thing that you can do is you can have your phone automatically sync all your contacts to your Google account and you’ll have access to them on your computer and other devices whenever you log in there. It will be similar to importing your manual backup file, but you wouldn’t have to do anything manually here. Let’s get started.

• On your Phone, go to Settings and look for Backup and Reset
  
• Here, make sure Back up my data is turned On and make sure that the backup account is set as your main account.
  
• Then, go back to settings and go to Accounts and then Google.
  
• Here, make sure the toggle next to Contacts is turned On. If it’s not, then turn it on and your contacts will start syncing then and there.
  
  
• Well, that’s it. Your phone will sync all your contacts in the background and you wouldn’t have to do anything manually.

I hope you were able to backup your contacts from your phone and even sync them with your Google account. If you face any problem, do let me know in the comments section below and I’ll be happy to clear that out for you. Also, don’t forget to share this article with your friends and family on social media platforms.