Once you’ve done that, you can head back to your iPhone’s Accounts page and uncheck “Contacts” for the accounts you no longer want to sync, or delete the contacts from those accounts altogether. Don’t worry about duplicates - we’ll deal with those soon. Head to the web interface for each of those accounts, find the “export” option and use it to put the file on your desktop for the time being - then import them into your main bucket (ideally, Google, just because it’s available in the most places and on the most devices). If you have contacts in other accounts, you’ll want to export them to a file on your computer, then import them into Gmail (or your email account of choice). Any account listed here with “Contacts” under its name is set to sync contacts - this could include iCloud, Gmail, Yahoo, Outlook and others. But if you use an iPhone, they could be stored in any number of places, so head to Settings and then Passwords & Accounts to see the different accounts on your phone.
#GOOGLE SYNC AND BACKUP USING WRONG EMAIL ANDROID#
If you use a phone with Google’s Android operating system, your contacts are likely already stored in a Gmail account. iPhone users could sync with iCloud, Samsung users can sync with their Samsung account, and so on - but these usually don’t have as many features as Gmail and won’t always sync with other platforms, so I recommend sticking with the bucket of contacts attached to your email service. Plus, it contains lots of advanced features and can even suggest updated information for your contacts who also use Gmail. You can sync a Google account with just about any phone and access it on the web. Here’s my advice: If you have a Gmail address, put your contacts in Google’s address book and keep them there. That likely means you have duplicates for some contacts, and storing them in two places means you could have trouble finding a contact’s information when you need it most. Here’s how: Pick one ‘bucket’ and sync all your contacts thereīefore you edit anything, you’ll need to make an important decision: Where do you want to store these contacts? Depending on your phone, there’s a good chance that you have some contacts stored in, say, an iCloud account, while the others are in a Google account. But with a few tricks, you can make the process a little easier and ensure that your contacts don’t get disorganized in the future. Sadly, there’s no one-size-fits-all approach when it comes to cleaning up your address book - and apps can’t read your mind, so you’ll have to do a lot of legwork yourself. But those contacts can get disorganized over time as you rack up duplicate entries, outdated information and numbers for people you no longer talk to. When was the last time you memorized a phone number? Thanks to smartphones and the internet, you can stuff hundreds of numbers and email and mailing addresses into your pocket without a second thought.