Phone by Google - How to back up contacts?

Malevolence

Malevolence

Malevolence

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I use the above app for my phone dialler and am getting a new phone today. For the life of me I cannot find any option in said app's settings to back-up or sync all my contacts. I really don't want to go through and have to manually add God knows how many entries.

Am I missing something that's staring me in the face?
 
Hmm, contacts are probably technically not stored by the dialer, more likely the account on the device, depending maybe what phone it is and what you choose when adding contacts. I'm on a Pixel and it asks me where I want to save the contact when I add one, I always select my gmail account. That's it. It's not really a matter of backing them up, they're in the cloud... I can browse or edit them on my PC if I want.

I think once option is to save them to the phone. It might be a little harder if you've chosen this method and I can't help you there.
 
Malevolence said:
For the life of me I cannot find any option in said app's settings to back-up or sync all my contacts.
Click to expand...

They're stored with your Google account. Click on Google Apps (the 9 dots in a square), the Contacts, and they should all be there. To export them to a backup - always a good idea - click on the Export icon and choose your export method.
 
Tried that, the Contacts for my Google account is empty despite them being on my phone and under the same account. So can't back them up as there's nothing there to back-up. Only showing on my phone, and in the app. there is no option to back-up/export.
 
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Malevolence said:
the Contacts for my Google account is empty despite them being on my phone and under the same account
Click to expand...
Well, as I said, not everything on your phone is in your google account. You have to link things to your account or add things to your account. They should be in the phone contacts though? I just tested by adding a contact to the phone and it shows in my Phone app, but it won't sync to my account. (It even warned me after I added to phone 'you have 1 contact that won't sync'.
 
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You should be able to export your contacts (probably to a vCard file) and then import them into Google Contacts.

You may require some finagling to get them all organised etc.

I have been using Google Contacts for my phonebook since about 2010.
 
Go to settings>system>backup and you should see an option for "google account data" so make sure contacts is selected under that, then make a backup (mine makes a backup to Google One). Then when you get your new phone you sign into your Google account on it and restore and it should restore all of your contacts.
 
biron_w said:
Go to settings>system>backup and you should see an option for "google account data" so make sure contacts is selected under that, then make a backup
Click to expand...
I don't believe this will work if he's not currently got his contacts saved in his google account, which he says he hasn't.

Anyway, lack of responses leads to me to assume he's sorted it.
 
Only managed to sort it out today. **** knows what the issue was. Yesterday I installed it on my new phone and it was showing no entries despite me using them on a daily basis. So uninstalled contacts from the new phone and checked online via my PC (and my old phone) and all my contacts were present and correct. Reinstalled contacts on my new phone and nothing, it was empty. Tried a few more times and on about the third try my contacts were present.

Guessing it was a glitch somewhere within the Google ecosystem.
 
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