iPhone4/itunes Sync question.Last time I did this I lost my ENTIRE Contact list

lancslass2008

Hi all

Last year I foolishly Syncronised my iPhone4 without reading through the process properly. As you can imagine, I was distraught. Apparently, I had set the process to transfer the contacts from my Windows address book (which I don't use) to my phone. Of course, as there were no contacts in my Windows address book the whole process simply copied a load of blank data to my phone. Thus I had lost every phone number I ever had in my phone.

I have now got my numbers & contacts back in my phone and I want to save them somewhere. I want to take them from my phone and store them somewhere else in case I lose my phone etc.

Can somebody suggest the safest (not losing my contacts) way of doing this?

Thanks all

jayme1

you have a few options, first is turn off contacts sync when you next connect to itunes to sync, do this by open itunes and connect the iphone, then at the top cancel the sync, click on the iphones name on the left had side of itunes and select the contacts tab and untick the 'sync contacts' option, that should prevent you from loosing your contacts.

but that wouldn't help if your phone was lost or stolen so to back up your contacts, the best 2 options are in the cloud

the first is google sync (watch the video on how cloud syncing works) (also this is what I use) in my gmail email I have all my contacts, then I follow these settings to get the contacts and calendar onto the phone, and from then on if I add a contact to my phone (or to gmail on the web) the change is copied to the other providing a constant back up, so if I lost my phone I just enter the gmail info onto the new phone and all my contacts and calendar is instantly there again.

the 2nd cloud option is apples iCloud which is not yet out but is coming very soon (like in the next few weeks) and you will be auto enroled with your apple ID when you install iOS5 which also comes out very soon, this does the same as gmail sync ie backs up your contacts, calendar and some other stuff, so if you lost your iphone you just sign into iCloud on the new iphone and your contacts come back.

as I understand if you use gmail it asks you if you 'want to keep existing contacts on the phone' if you select 'yes' it will back up the contacts on the phone to the contacts on gmail then keep then in sync, I didnt use that way though as I entered all my contacts into gmail manually, then set up the sync and chose the option to delete all contacts from the phone.
depending how many contacts you have you could either use that option or just manually type them to gmail.

lancslass2008

Thank you for taking the time to help me Jayme.