Backup your contacts to a .vcf file (and the cloud… if you trust that stuff) before your smartphone gets lost or damaged

Most phones these days come with touch screens which means one accident and you could be holding a useless device. Zero access to your contacts or messages or telephone calls or social media can make you feel doomed!

Despite fitting an explosion proof screen protector and the beautiful protective HTC dot view case, my phone screen started a slow and painful death after some 2 years of being permanently on. Not a single crack in any of its numerous falls, but its screen is now almost useless. A screen replacement is going to cost me at least 20,000 Naira and I think that’s just unfair especially given all the measures I took to protect it.

My friends know I will only get a new phone when I absolutely have to. And so I did. When I moved my SIM card to the new phone, I found that (for whatever reason,) the last time a new contact got saved to Google was over a year ago. I could have sworn I had set my default contact save/sync location to Google the day I got the old phone.

“Hello, who is this? …Sorry, I did not delete your number; I lost my contacts when I changed phones…”

^^ Now that’s a very shameful statement for a techie to utter. Am I a learner?:-(

Anyway, after a lot of pain with the dying screen, I was able to do an Excel spreadsheet backup using an Android application called Contacts Backup. Google Contacts unfortunately could not import the output though I saved it as CSV. More (re)searching to do.

I later found another Android app called Super Backup that was able to export contacts from the HTC to a VCF (vcard) file which I successfully imported into Google Contacts. VCF is a neat file format that most contact management applications will accept with no issues. I should also mention that Google has improved on their “find duplicates and merge” functionality.

Because I use my Google account as a contacts source on my iPhone, I did not need to manually import the VCF file in iCloud. Once the contacts were available on Google, the iPhone picked them up. You can add a contact source just like you are adding an email account but you only select contacts among items to sync.

I’ve now decided I will manually export my contacts periodically so I don’t waste valuable time if/when I lose access to my primary device (or the cloud). And yes, my next phone will have dual-SIM and physical keyboard. Enough of this touch-screen dependency!