Backing up and restoring Google Contacts

Last Updated on November 29, 2019 by Christopher G Mendla

My previous post mentioned difficulties encountered in trying to restore a single deleted Google Contact.

Here is a method for making a periodic backup copy of your contacts and how to recover a single deleted contact (Assuming it was in the backup)

• Make sure you are in the OLD version of Google Contacts, You are in the old version if the last entry in the left hand menu is “Try Contacts Preview”
• Go to MORE, EXPORT

• Choose to export all contacts in the Google CSV format.

• The file will be downloaded on your machine. IF you have enough Google space, you could load this back up into Google Drive and create a folder called “Contact Backups”

• Go to IMPORT CONTACTS at the bottom of the left side menu

• Choose the file with all of your contacts.

• Note that the contacts will be in a label with a date time stamp. BE CAREFUL because any merge or remove duplicates could cause a mess.

 

 

 

 

• Find the record(s) that you want to recover, remove the datetime stamp label and add the appropriate label
• When done , delete all of the records in the datetime stamp folder. Select all of the records in the folder with the dropdown at the top left

 

• Once you’ve selected all, you can delete the contacts from the MORE button – NOTE – if there are multiple pages of contacts, you will have to repeat this process a couple of times
• Once you have deleted all of the contacts in the datetimestamp folder, then you can delete the group.

 

 

All that because the genius engineers at Google can’t grasp the simple concept that you might need to restore a recently deleted contact.