Categories AndroidHow To

How to Backup/Export & Restore/Import Contacts on Your Android Phone

Having backed up contacts from your Android Smartphone becomes handy when you have to perform a data wipe, modify your phone you lose your data due to some mishap. You can easily restore all of your contacts within few seconds. I’ve compiled up some easiest methods in order to help you to backup your contacts conveniently. Follow the steps explained below to do so.

Contents

How to Backup/Export & Restore/Import Contacts on Your Android Phone

1. Export vCard to your sd card

First of all, In case you don’t know what is a vCard, vCard is a file format which contains all of your contacts and can be used to restore the contacts from it at any time.

Open Contacts, Press the options key access the preferences.

Tap the ”Import/Export” option

After you press the Import/Export option you will get another screen showing you the options as shown below.

Tap ”Export to SD card”. This option is the safest one to create a vCard, as you can copy the vCard from you SD card to your computer as well or you can save that file in cloud storage e.g Dropbox.

After you select Export to SD card you will get another pop up to confirm the process, press ok here and let it begin, as soon as you press ok a vCard having all your contacts will be created on your SD card. You can also import this vCard file in any other smartphone.

Save the vCard is preferred more as whenever you have to perform a data wipe, the data on your internal storage might be lost but the SD card isn’t formatted as long as you don’t do it manually or delete the file manually.

Ok so now here is how you can restore these contacts using the same Import/Export option. This time you need to press the options key and tap ”Import”.

After you tap Imort you will get an option to save your contacts. You can select your desired place, where the contacts will be restored.

  • Selecting ”Device” will restore the contacts to your phone
  • Also, Selecting ”Samsung Account” will restore your contacts to your Samsung Account.
  • Selecting ”Google” will restore your contacts to your gmail account which you are using in your Android phone.

As soon as you select the option to restore your contacts, it will tend to find the vCard file on your SD Card.

After you select a place to restore your contacts, you will get an option to specify whether you want to import only one vCard or you want to import multiple vCard, you can choose to depend upon your need/choice. Select the vCard file you want to restore and press ”ok”.

All of your contacts will be restored to the place you selected above.

2. Use an App to Backup & Restore Your Contacts

Super Backup is an app available in the play store that can help you to Backup your contacts, call logs, messages, and apps as well, for apps you will need root access while you can backup contacts, call logs and messages without root access. We will discuss how you can restore the contacts for now, while tutorials on backing up call logs and messages are can be found here:

So, Let’s begin.

Install the app here or download it directly from play store in your pone

Open the app and tap ”Contacts Backup”

I am assuming that you are using this app first time and you want to make a backup first, so tap ”Backup” here.

It will ask you to enter a file name as soon as you tap Backup. Give it a file name and press ok to proceed.

As soon as you press ”Ok” it will start the backup and give you a pop-up notification saying completely. It will ask you if you wish to send the backed up vCard(.vcf) file to your email, tap send to mail it or else tap ”not now”.

 

Hopefully, you have learned now how you can back up your contacts, here is now how you can restore the backed up contacts easily. Get back to the main screen of the Contacts Backup and tap ”Restore” this time.

As soon as you tap Restore it will detect the Backed Up file from your phone’s memory and ask you to select it. Select the file and it will proceed.

The contacts restore process will complete and pop out a notification telling you ”complete”

3. Sync Your Contacts With Your Google Account

1. Open settings on your Android Smartphone

2. Open Sync Settings or Accounts

3. Tap Google account.

4. Select the account you are using on your device.

5. Check the ”Sync Contacts” Option.

That’s all, Your contacts will now be Synchronized with your Gmail Account and you can restore them to any device at anytime you want by using the Sync option.

Got any queries? Feel free to leave a comment below, we’ll try our best to help you. Thank You

 

 

This post was last modified on June 2, 2018 4:32 am

Usama M

Usama is a software engineer by profession and at TechBeasts.com he uses his expertise to solve everyday consumer tech problems with his main areas of interest being Android, iOS and Windows.

View Comments

  • Great post! Thank you for sharing! Before I use only Myjad Android Contacts/SMS to recover my lost data. They works well but now I have another option:)

  • I want to export my contact and sms data to my sd card .. i am not able to do it since there is no export import button showing .. my phone is samsung grand duos GT -19082

    • @s_k_mathur:disqus The menu might be different for your phone, you will have to find it in contacts menu or settings.

  • I have synced my google account with my android contacts...but the problem is when I view those contacts through my PC on my Gmail account...only the email IDs are visible not the phone numbers. what should I do?

  • Thank you Usama.M The article was helpful .Successfully transfered the contacts from "device" to google account. My device is galaxy grand so i had to use Super Backup.

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