Help Help backing up contacts to gmail

[Dave46]

Hi back again,

I've changed my network provider and of course need to swap my sim. I'm just a bit worried that I'll loose my contacts which I'm guessing are stored on my vodafone sim? I've heard that you can use gmail (which I already have) to back up but I'm having trouble working out how to do this. Any help would be brilliant. Thanks

 

[johncf]

hi there, i do not know how to back them up with google, but the easiest way to back them up is to go to menu>people>menu> ( settings? i dont have my phone to check), and in there some where is the option to back up all your contacts to your sd card.

when you have done, put this sd card in your new phone and import from there.

 

[mbatson89]

Check under accounts and sync, under your google account you shold have the option to 'sync contacts' check this option and let it do it's sync.

Log in to your gmail on a computer and just double check your contacts are all there as they should be. The phone will do it all itself and then if you were to pick up any other android phone and enter your google account details it will repopulate all your contacts for you

 

[Dave46]

Thanks, gone in and sync but its not bringing any contacts into gmail, just one for me. Any ideas?

 

[Cornflake]

Check this out: How do I sync android phone contacts to my online gmail acct? - Gmail Help

Poster Eric_DL is the one to watch out for but it's worth reading the whole (2-page) thread before acting.
Maybe his most important point is this:

BTW, there's one thing important to understand on the syncing mechanism of Google contacts between Gmail and your phone.
Your phone keeps a copy of your Google contacts DB, it's a synced copy of the one kept on Google servers (the one you see online in GMail contacts). But "synced" doesn't mean that the content of one DB is somehow copied to the other .... this would require you to define which of the two copies is the master and which is the slave. Actually "synced" means that any action done on one DB gets propagated to the other ... and this works in both directions (ie : you delete contact A from the phone and add contact B online on GMail => next sync operation propagates both deletion of contact A to GMail online contacts DB and addition of contact B on the phone copy of your Google contacts DB).
To put it simply : sync propagates your actions, not your contacts.
I think misunderstanding of this behavior is the most frequent root-cause behind people posting here claiming that they lost all their contacts.