Anggriawan Sugianto

Some days ago I lost all my cell phone contacts due to silly factory reset. Unfortunately, I did backup my contacts 1.5 years ago. Yeah, it's been so long time, but it's better than no backup at all, rite. To prevent this silly thing happen in the future, I should backup my cell phone contacts regularly.

There are two major ways to do backup your cell phone contacts: offline backup and online backup. Offline backup means you store your phone contacts in a file located on your phone memory card or your PC. Your cell phone usually has this feature (to backup contacts to memory card). Otherwise, you can use cable data (or bluetooth) and your phone PC suite to sync your contacts to your PC.

Another method is online backup. You can store your phone contacts in the cloud. I prefer Google Contacts for this purpose, because I use Gmail for my primary email. Actually Google has a service called Google Sync, which is using Exchange ActiveSync technology, that implemented in recent smartphones, such as BlackBerry, iPhone, Windows Mobile phone, Nokia S60. For "not-so-classic phones" user, like me with my LG KU380, you can still use Google Sync service by using SyncML, which is platform-independent information synchronization standard. Here I will describe how to sync your cell phone contacts (in my case: LG KU380) with Google Contacts using SyncML:

1. LG KU380

   On your cellphone, go to menu [0] Connectivity → [2] Server sync → [3] Server synch. centre. You may find it on another menu if you use different phone.
2. Add new server synch. centre
• Profile name: Google
• Host address: https://m.google.com/syncml
• Username: <your gmail address>
• Password: <your gmail password>
• Contacts: On
• Contact name: contacts
• Sync type: Normal
• Access point: <your cellphone APN>
3. Prepare your Google Contacts, especialy "My Contacts" group, because only this group that will be synchronized with your cell phone contacts.
4. Synchronize your contacts
• Go to menu [8] Contacts → [8] Settings → [2] Synchronize contact, or
• Go to menu [0] Connectivity → [2] Server sync → [1] Connect

Voilà! Your phone contacts is synchronized with Google contacts. Now you can add/update/delete contacts through your cellphone or Google, then sync it later. If your cell phone doesn't have feature for autosync, then you should sync it manually and regularly.