Electronic devices, especially mobile phones are vulnerable to a variety of problems, therefore it is highly critical to keep backing up your data every now and then to ensure that you don’t end up losing everything in case your device is crashed or something else happens to it. Data such as Messages, Pictures, and most importantly Contacts are precious and you would never want to lose them. In older mobile phones, it was not really easy to back up your data but now in high-end mobile phones such as iPhone 4G, backing up and restoring your data is a breeze and doesn’t require much technical knowledge.
For backing up your contacts, you would need an iPhone 4G itself, iTunes, and third party address book software, such as Yahoo Address Book, Outlook or MaxOSX to store the contacts in your PC.
For people using Windows operating system in their PCs,Outlook is the most preferred choice to have their contact list stored. Since outlook and iTunes can connect to each other without much hassle, it makes the process of transferring even more easy in the case of iPhone 4G which comes with built in support of many address books.
You can use your data cable or Bluetooth to connect your phone with the PC, which is a simple process, and iTunes is smart enough to find the connection and run the application on its own.
Inside iTunes you will be able select the source area of you iPhone, this will allow you to select the data that you want to sync and backup. E.g. I prefer to backup only the contacts and not messages and Pictures, hence, I select the contacts only, and contacts are quickly transferred into my PC. iTunes is a very easy program to use, hence don’t be afraid of the fact that you are using it for the first time. It is self-explanatory in most cases and various tutorials are also available online to help you get going with iTunes.
For MAC users, the data can be stored into the iTunes directly but people using windows will have to select which address book they want to use for backup, Yahoo, Outlook or Windows Address book. Most of the address books also allow you to group specific contacts and then sync only a particular group(s). This is not a one-time process, you can perform it as many time as you want. It is highly recommended to sync your data with iTunes every 2-3 days to ensure that you have the latest backup of your mobile phone to restore incase anything goes wrong.
Once the data is stored in your address book , Outlook, Yahoo or any other, you can save it as CSV as well, which is the most widely used contacts list format. This will allow you to import the contacts in multiple address books to have multiple backups with different services, so that you have your data stored in multiple locations which will help in guaranteed recovery in case something bad happens.
