Contact Backup App

[No-Nonsense]

Why aren't there any contact backup/restore applications available in the App Store?

I was desperately searching a way to move my contacts out of MobileMe and tried different approaches, but a standalone backup/restore app would have saved me hours:
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/607433/

Even appart of my initial problem, the built-in backup/restore functionality of iTunes isn't reliable from my point of view and doesn't offer features like selective restore of contacts.

I would be glad to hear your opinions or ideas reguarding this issue.

Thanks in advance, greetings from Germany,
-Jens

 

[Gokunama]

I'm not familiar with MobileMe. I use Funambol to back up my data to Mobyko, and if I ever need to download them again, I would need the Mobyko app. All of it is free and takes little time.

 

[No-Nonsense]

I'm not familiar with MobileMe. I use Funambol to back up my data to Mobyko, and if I ever need to download them again, I would need the Mobyko app. All of it is free and takes little time.

Did you try how well the restore from Funambol actually works?

Before starting the MobileMe trial I had tried Funambol as it was free. I wasn't that excited, as Funambol isn't tied to the iPhone but tries to be a solution for nearly all kind of mobile phones. The idea is great, but the flaws are that it only synchronizes the intersection of all the fields supported by most devices and might alter data.

The contact picture for example is stored on the iPhone at high resolution together with the information which part of the picture you chose to display. At any time you can rechose the region of the image you want to have displayed. Synchronizing with Google Contacts did only transfer the selected region and did recompress the selection leaving me with a low resolution crop of the original contact picture.

At the time I tried Funambol it had problems assigning all my contacts fields to the Funambol ones. I admit that I have extended the phone number tags to have a more detailed description of the mobile number (i.e. which carrier) and that this could get Funambol into trouble. But the guys could have offered a dialog to assign unknown categories manually to Funambol ones. Another issue was that the iPhone Contacts application does not store any country information when you do not chose to alter the default. On my iPhone the default is Germany. When synchronizing with Funambol no country information was transmitted and Funambol defaulted to USA (wich might be ok for the mayority of the Funambol customers).

I would retry Funambol if they have solved the issues mentioned above. Anybody from Europe that has any good news on that topic?

 

[No-Nonsense]

Back to the original backup application issue:

I have contacted a developer of an app that enables you to backup/restore single contacts by E-Mail. He might write an application to backup/restore your whole contacts.

What do you think? Do you have the need for such an application?

-Jens

 

[Gokunama]

That would be the ultimate solution I think. I'd pay for that.

 

[SFC Archer]

If you use Gmail, your contacts will never be lost and they backup/update everytime you sync plus they are viewable from anywhere if you were to ever loose or have your iPhone stolen....and its FREE

 

[No-Nonsense]

If you use Gmail, your contacts will never be lost and they backup/update everytime you sync plus they are viewable from anywhere if you were to ever loose or have your iPhone stolen....and its FREE

Do you synchronize with Google Contacts using Nuevasync or using the iTunes built-in contact synchronization with Google Contacts?

The issues I experienced with the synchronization with Google Contacts are:
- Google Contacts does not have all of the fields of the iPhone (e.g. birthdate) which means that some information is lost
- Google Contacts does crop and reduce the quality of the contact picture
- some fields are assigned wrong on either side (iPhone / Google Contacts)

This is why I am despreately searching a true backup/restore solution that also enables me to do a selective restore.

Greetings from Germany,
-Jens