Backup!

I am amazed at the number of iPhone users who use their iPhone as the primary source of their contacts. This is a bad idea as if for any reason your iPhone becomes unusable, you risk losing your contacts for good. For most people, their contacts are important.

A good habit to get into is to sync your iPhone regularly with iTunes - I do it daily. This will first backup your iPhone so you can recover your settings, etc. from a backup if you ever need to. However, with a setting change or two you can also backup your contacts as well.

Once your iPhone is plugged into your PC/Mac and iTunes is running, select your iPhone in the left pane of iTunes and then click on the "Info" tab in the right pane. From there you can configure several sync settings but for now focus on Contacts. There are several external contact managers that you can choose to sync your contacts with - in Windows there is Outlook, Google Contacts, Windows Contacts, and Yahoo! Address Book. On the Mac there only appears to be one free external source, Mac's own contact manager ( I could be wrong here, there may be other sources but all I can see is Mac's contact manager ) - of course there's always the paid service MobileMe.



Unless you already use a contact manager such as Outlook, you can keep it simple and choose "Windows Contacts" ( this is on Vista, it may be called something slightly different on an XP or Windows 7 PC ).

Now, once you click on "Sync contacts with" and select your external contact manager on the right you just need to select "Apply" or "Sync" at the bottom right of iTunes. After the sync your iPhone contacts will be saved in Windows Contacts on your PC. Your initial sync may ask you if you want to replace the contacts on your iPhone with the ones on your PC and vice versa ... just choose "Merge" to play it safe.

Now if you lose your iPhone ( pray that never happens ) or if it gets bricked or unusable for any reason, you will always have your precious contacts saved on your PC or Mac, you simply have to sync them from your contact manager ( e.g. Windows Contacts ) to your new or fixed iPhone, disaster averted.

If you're like me, your contact information is precious/valuable, you don't want to EVER lose them. With these simple steps you can ensure that your contacts will always be safe.