Backing up is hard to do, but not for Gmail and Google Contacts

You brush and floss your teeth. You bathe regularly. You back up your documents, digital music, and photos, compulsively. These are all forms of hygiene. The cost to us of not doing these things is much higher than doing them. Losing all our email and contact information would be devastating for most for of us.

Two recent events highlighted how important this is. Two weeks ago I received phone calls from clients complaining they could not send or receive email. They all used Cablevision’s Optimum Online service. They thought it was them. Turned out it was Cablevision, who had an equipment failure that took down most, if not all, of their email services for an extended period. Cablevision was slow to announce this problem. My customers who used Optimum’s web-based email client had no access to their contact books. Even if they had another email account, such as @hotmail or @yahoo, they had no way of finding the email addresses they needed.

The second event was more devastating but limited in scope. A distraught woman called me on a Saturday evening and left a voice message that a technician who had worked on her equipment had erased her 955 contacts from Outlook, her iPhone and MobileMe. The technician had neglected to back up the Outlook PST file and export the contact data before trying to initiate synchronization among the three information stores. The result was that he overwrote the good contact information with empty fields, thereby destroying all of the information. We are still working on resurrecting the contact list from a year old Palm device data dump. This has been a painful experience for both of us. I am glad it happened to some other technician and not me.

If you use email and address book (AKA contacts) applications on your computer you can back up this data as part of your normal back up routine. These are applications like Outlook, Outlook Express, Windows Mail, Windows Address Book, Thunderbird, or Apple Mail. You will need to know where the applications store their data files and include them in your back up. Typically these applications must be closed before the data files can be backed up. Otherwise, the application locks the file making it unavailable for copying.

I suggest you also consider finding out how to export your contact list information into a plain text or CSV file. This way the exported information is easily read and imported into other applications, both local to your computer and online.

Many of us use Gmail’s web-based email client for our email. We rely upon Google to be there for us. But what if they suffer an extended outage like Cablevision? Or what if they lock you out of your account? Do you have a back-up of your contacts? How about your email? Email often contains important information we need.

Backing up Gmail contacts is simple.

1. Go to Gmail and click on the Contacts link in the left side panel.
2. Click on the Export link on the upper right of the Contacts page.
3. Select the Everyone (All Contacts) radio button.
4. Select an export format from the three choices.
5. Click the Export button.

Gmail will name the file and ask you where you want to save it. You might modify the file name to be more descriptive than the default.

I use a free Windows utility to back up my Gmail email to my computers. It is called Gmail Backup available for download at http://www.gmail-backup.com/download.

So when was the last time you backed up contacts and email?