How to Backup iPhone Contacts

Over the years, you’ve most likely built up an impressive list of contacts on your iPhone and it would be a disaster to lose them, so here’s how to backup your iPhone contacts so that you always save and unharmed.

Your music, games, apps, etc. While important to you, your contacts are probably the most important of all things stored on your iPhone. You may know the phone numbers of some of your close friends and family members by heart, but what about the number of that cute boy/girl you got last night? You probably don’t want to lose it, so it’s essential that you back up your contacts as often as possible.

Fortunately, Apple makes it relatively easy to back up iPhone contacts, and there are a few different methods you can use. Backing up your iPhone through iTunes as you normally would, backs up your contacts, or you can set iCloud to include Contact backups that will sync your contacts between Apple devices. This can be great especially if you have several Apple devices that you use on a daily basis.

Whichever method you choose, you’ll have the confidence of knowing that if your iPhone breaks down, you won’t lose any of your contacts. Also, backing up your iPhone is one of the most important maintenance tasks you can do because it can save you from certain disaster if your phone dies or if you accidentally drop it and break it. If you don’t have any data backed up, you will lose all of it if the device crashes or malfunctions.

Backup iPhone Contacts to iTunes

To backup iPhone contacts via iTunes, you just need to back up your iPhone as you normally would, as there is no way to back up your contacts. Follow these simple instructions to back up your iPhone:

How to Backup iPhone Contacts to iCloud

While backing up your iPhone using iCloud is more convenient than backing up via iTunes, iCloud doesn’t back up everything, but your contacts.

Backing up your iPhone with iTunes backs up your entire device, including apps. However, iCloud only backs up photos, videos, documents, contacts, iMessages and SMS text messages and settings; therefore, although it backs up the app data, it does not back up the apps you have installed. This makes sense because many apps take up a lot of space, and with only 5GB of free iCloud storage, this may not be enough to store all your apps.

So, although you can back up using iCloud, we still recommend backing up via iTunes if you want to back up absolutely everything. Follow these instructions to backup your iPhone contacts using iCloud.

How to Restore from a Backup

If you need to restore your iPhone, you can do so easily using the iOS Setup Assistant, the fancy name for all the menus you go through when you first set up your iPhone.

Meanwhile, you will eventually arrive at a screen that will ask you how you want to set up your new iPhone. You can set up your device as a brand new iPhone or restore from a backup by selecting or depending on how your device was backed up.

If you have multiple backups, it will give you a list you can choose to restore. Usually, the most recent backup is the one you’ll want to choose for obvious reasons.