Export Your People to Safety

I tinker – a lot! I mess things up – a lot!

It’s how I learn and why I know what I know.

So, a while back I was messing with my CRM (Contact Relationship Manager) and linking it to synchronize with my google contacts and I managed to wipe out all my personal contacts.

The good news is that I know what I did and why it happened (It was a setting) and I also got a good healthy reminder about why we need backups. (I had one)

In technology, things go wrong. A lot!

It doesn’t matter your skill, or your understanding, or how often it has worked correctly in the past. Things happen, and the ability to recover, and to recover quickly is what matters.

Another happy thing is that Google has a “recover contacts” option and I was able to reset my contact list to how it was prior to the “syncing” adventure. And even if that didn’t work, I would have been able to restore from one of my backups.

Your challenge this week is to create a backup of your contacts. Often contacts are one of the things that don’t necessarily get backed up with your automated backup system for a variety of reasons.

The common format for backing up contacts is the .CSV file format. This .CSV format can be read by excel or google sheets as well as the programs that organize your contacts, like Gmail, Outlook, and your Customer Relationship Management (CRM) program.

To create a versatile backup you should “export” your contacts to a “.CSV” file and save it to your computer.

Exporting simply creates a copy of the information into a format that can be used later somewhere else. It will not delete or mess up your stuff.

Here is what an exported .CSV file looks like. This is just raw data of contacts.

Export your contacts, open the file, take a look.

To export your contacts from Gmail

First you need to find your contacts. In the upper right corner of your email is the 9 square Google menu “Contacts” should be among the options. If not scroll down and click “More”
Once in Contacts look to the left (You may need to click the hamburger menu in the upper left corner) for “More”. Select it and choose Export.
From the Export options you can choose which contacts you want to export and which format you want. For a Gmail contact back-up choose the .CSV format for Google account.
When you click export you will download a file you can save in a safe place on your computer to use when you need it.

To export your contacts from Outlook (Online)

From your email. look to the lower-left corner choose the “people” symbol.
Near the top choose “manage” and select “Export contacts”
From this Export box you can choose which contacts you want to export and it will automatically download a .CSV file of your Outlook contacts that you can save in a safe place on your computer and use if you need it.

Exporting contacts from the Outlook program that comes with Office 365 is a very different process, but it can be done and if you have an automatic backup system that backs up your computer then your contacts will be backed up with your Outlook program.

To Export your contacts for Mac Mail

If we are just talking about backing up your contacts, they are automatically backed up through iCloud.
Apple has made it unusually difficult to export your contacts in a .CSV file, but it can be done in a variety of creative ways, that are too cumbersome for this blog post.

Nicole Lux-Ritchie - Founder of Luxcentric

Nicole's mission is to help feminine professionals gain the technical
skills they need to grow their business and focus on their missions.
The focus of Luxcentric is on training practical strategies in the area of the core technologies.
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