Backing up to your phone’s memory.
There are many different ways to back up your contacts to an Android Phone’s internal or external memory. Perhaps the easiest way is to use the built in export to memory function. This is a quick and easy process that once completed gives you a copy of your contacts that you can then import into another phone or copy to your computer.
Check out my tutorial for backing up to a memory card or internal memory here.
Utilizing a Third Party App
If you have an older phone or for some other reason you don’t have the option to export your contacts all is not lost. There are many different programs in the Android Market that will let you export your contacts to your internal memory. Just pull up the Android Market and search for contacts backup. From the results select one that fits your needs and has decent reviews. As a best practice you should always check the reviews before using a program. No reviews isn’t necessarily bad but a lot of bad ones are.
Backing Up to your Gmail Account
If your Android phone is setup properly, then your contacts are automatically backed up to your Gmail account. You can check this out by logging into your Gmail account and clicking the contacts link in the upper left hand corner. If contacts show up, then they have been backed up to the phone. One thing you need to be careful with is if some of your contacts are only on your phone.
Phone Only Contacts
On many Android phones there is an option to save only to the phone. I really don’t understand why the phone manufactures have added this option as it is not a native Android option. When you choose phone instead of your Gmail account, you will not have a backup copy of your contact. The only way to get one is to use the backup method above to back them up. You can check this out by following the steps below.
Access your contacts on your phone. This is most easily done by clicking the phone icon and selecting contacts. Then press on your menu button and finally on the display options button. It may not say Display. Different phone manufactures will call it different things. If you don’t see a display option try looking for something similar. Once in the “Display” option if you see an option that says phone select it. You will likely see a number next to phone. This is the number of contacts you have saved only to phone. These are the ones you should be worried about. You should be able to use the export function above to export these and then restore them under your GMail account. More on this later.