How to Back Up Your iPhone Contacts

 

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For many of us, our contacts list are the most important part of our iPhones and what we care most about backing up. It’s easy to re-download apps and adjust settings, but it can be very difficult to rebuild a large contact list of names, email addresses, and phone numbers if you lose it. For that reason you may want to be sure the address book is being backed up so that all of your contacts are preserved in case you need to restore them, here is how to do this.

Back Up iPhone Contacts With iTunes

iTunes will backup the contacts from an iPhone by default unless you have disabled it, you can make sure this happens by doing the following:

1. Connect the iPhone to the computer and launch iTunes
2. Select the device from the left-side list, and click on the “Info” tab
3. Verify that “Sync Contacts” is checked
4. Adjust any specific settings as necessary
5. Right-click on the iPhone name in the device list and choose “Back Up”

The final step performs a manual backup with iTunes and stores that backup on the local computer.

Backing Up Contacts with iCloud

If you use iCloud as your backup solution, and you really should, contacts will be synced and backed up to iCloud automatically. This is turned on when using iCloud by default, but you can verify it is configured and then force a backup by doing the following:

1. Launch “Settings” and tap on “iCloud”
2. Verify the iCloud account is set up and that “Contacts” is turned ON


3. Scroll down and tap on “Storage & Backup”
4. Tap “Back Up Now”

This initiates a manual backup to iCloud which contains contacts and all other data you have configured. This is often considered preferable to using iTunes backups alone because anything stored within iCloud can be backed up from virtually anywhere that has internet access and without using a computer.
Remember that if you just want to share a contact with someone else, you can send contacts from iPhone to other devices in the form of a vCard very easily.