Recently, a friend of mine dropped his phone and spoilt it. With the drop, gone are all his contacts stored in the phone. Another one lost her phone a couple of weeks back, and since she hardly comes online, I was wondering why no news at all from her after so many weeks. Apparently, she lost her phone and with it, all her contact numbers.
That made me realize, in this time and age, when people are so dependent on storing contact numbers in their phone, it is more important than ever that our connection with friends should not be severed by a single point of failure, our phone. People should be backing up their contacts somewhere else, such that when disaster strikes their phone (fingers crossed don’t happen), it should be a simple task of restoring their latest contacts, rather than trying to ask their friends one-by-one via email or facebook for their contact numbers.
I periodically (as much as daily, or a few times a week) syncs my contacts, calendars, and tasks from my Nokia E90 to Mac’s iCal and Address Book via iSync. Sync-ing is done via Bluetooth, so I just need to have my phone within 5-7 metres of my Macbook, launch iSync, and click on “Sync Devices”. As simple as that. Calendar entries from iCal are then synced in the background to Google Calendar. I don’t sync any contacts to online services. Maybe I should, but in the mean time, I trust Time Machine backup that keeps me safe up to the last hour of my data. Good enough for me.
There are TONS of online services, most of them are free, that allows you to sync your contacts (and possibly calendars) from your phone to that online service. Check out Windows Live Contacts and Windows Live Calendar for you Microsoft and MSN users out there or Google Sync for Gmail fans.
Do you backup the data in your phone? How, and where?
