Help Address book back up

[Simon_Gardner]

Following my recent Note 3 corruption and factory reset meltdown I have become interested in backups.

Specifically, I want to back up my phone's internal address book. (This is a Mac only place and has been since 1983.) [I have just about finished tediously recreating my address book.]

There is clearly a facility to back the address book up to card - but in encoded form, I think. I'm interested in converting the address book to a plain text file too. I guess I can back the address book up in its encoded form and copy the file over using Android File Transfer (or email it to myself) which would give me a safe off-phone back up at least.

But I'm after that plain text file as well.

I'm not personally interested in cloud solutions.

 

[Harry2]

I think you mean back up as .vcf file on SD card.
.vcf is almost a plain txt file, just formated txt, every Office program can import it and show it as plain text.

 

[Simon_Gardner]

I think you mean back up as .vcf file on SD card.
.vcf is almost a plain txt file, just formated txt, every Office program can import it and show it as plain text.

(*Emails the file to self*)

Well not really. It's heaps of JPG encoding for starters. Microsoft Word continues to show it as that with some text interspersed. Ditto Excel. It seems to want to use Microsoft Entourage. I have no idea what that is and don't particularly want to. I had no idea I had it. And I don't really use any Microsoft products normally anyway. Word is there for others.

It default opens perfectly OK into Apple's Address Book but I don't use that either and don't wish to. What I actually want is a text file of the non-picture data.

 

[Harry2]

I see, the JPGs, forgot the pictures in the phonebook ... sorry, my praxis with .vcf seems to be outdated

Long time ago I used .vcf files for to convert each kind of addressbook to each other kind on phones and computers.
Importing the .vcf files of the source and of target on a spreadsheet program like MS Excel on a computer, I sorted the columns of the source like they were on the target and then I exportd the modified source as .vcf file. This .vcf file could be imported on the target phone as addressbook.

Sorry for misleading.

 

[Harry2]

Not the direct way to a text file would be using MyPhoneExplorer. App as client on the phone, program as host on the PC, syncing via USB or WiFi or Bluetooth.
On PC, the program opens the phonebook also in Word, Excel and some others.
Word can export it as text file.
I use MyPhoneExplorer for backing up my phonebook for a long time, so I just tried it on my PC

BTW ... looking on my PC I also saw that my two posts above are pretty useless ... I mixed up .vcf with .csv

 

[Simon_Gardner]

Also NO PC here.

 

[Harry2]

Just had a look on Play Store ... 'Contacts to Text' does fairly what you want

BTW, found also an app which I'd choose for a back up job: 'Contacts CSV Export' ... for further processing in Excel

 

[Simon_Gardner]

Doh. Turns out I'd already got Contacts to Text. Just forgot. Idiot.

It works.

 

[Rukbat]

For future questions, Google Contacts will export to a csv file, which is pretty much pure text.