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Today my SD Card broke. I do not have a replacement. I have some important contacts on my phone which were not synchronized with Google. Before formatting the sdcard (as a last restort to see if I do have to buy a replacement) I'd really like to retrieve them, however all the import/export options are about phone internal memory, sdcard and SIM. Is there any way to export all my contacts to Google?

I do have access to the internet and I do have all synchronisation options available enabled.

Can I do something better than spending some hours writing the contacts manually on GMail?

Bakuriu
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  • Doesn't the GMail web frontend offer an export option? Being firewalled, I currently cannot check, but I'm pretty sure there is such an option. – Izzy Nov 26 '13 at 16:28
  • @Izzy I just looked and cannot see anything that resembles what I'm looking for. The google contacts are synchronised, but I couldn't care less. I want my phone and SIM contacts to be transferred on the google account and searching on the net I can only find solution that require first exporting on sdcard. – Bakuriu Nov 26 '13 at 16:41
  • Your SIM contacts might pose an issue, as they are not syncronized. You might need to first import them (convert them to Google contacts); not having tried that, I cannot say for sure. For the rest, see my answer below. – Izzy Nov 26 '13 at 16:49

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According to the GMail help pages, you should be able to easily export your contacts using a web browser:

  1. Sign in to Gmail.
  2. Click Gmail at the top-left corner of your Gmail page, then choose Contacts.
  3. From the More drop-down menu, select Export....
  4. Choose whether to export all contacts or only one group.
  5. Select the format in which you'd like to export your contacts' information. Please note, some of these formats can lose some contact information.
    • To transfer contacts between Google accounts, use the Google CSV format. This is the recommended way to back up your Google Contacts.
    • To transfer contacts to Outlook, Yahoo! Mail, Hotmail, or various other apps, use the Outlook CSV format.
    • To transfer contacts to Apple Address Book, use the vCard format.
  6. Click Export.
  7. Choose Save to Disk then click OK.
  8. Select a location to save your file, and click OK.

This (and some other details) are also described in a post titled How to Create Mail Merge in Gmail Contacts.

Now you write you have some contacts which are not synchronized with your Google account, but stored on your SIM card. Of course, you first need to "convert" them to "Google contacts", which is described in How do I import all contacts from a SIM-card to an Android phone?:

  1. open the contacts app
  2. press the "menu" key
  3. navigate to Import/Export → Import from SIM card
  4. click "Select All" (or manually select the contacts you wish to import)
  5. when asked where to copy the contacts to, select the appropriate option

This procedure can also be found in a tutorial at AndroidAdvices, together with some screenshots to visualise the process.

Your broken SD card should not matter here, as it isn't involved anywhere in the process.

See also:

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Izzy
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  • From the mobile view I don't see any "Contacts" tab at all. Using the Desktop view I cannot see any more... for point 3. Also by "sign in to Gmail" you mean to sign in into mail.google.com or into the Gmail app? My comments refer to the website and the app has even less options available (Note that I use gingerbread). – Bakuriu Nov 26 '13 at 17:22
  • Anyway I believe you are answering the opposite question... I don't care of exporting Gmail contacts. I want to import some contacts in Gmail from the local phone storage and SIM. The gmail contacts are already synched, but they do not include local phone contacts and SIM contacts. That's the point of my question. – Bakuriu Nov 26 '13 at 17:32
  • Oops: Sorry, I in fact missed that. Updated my answer accordingly. – Izzy Nov 26 '13 at 19:05
  • I'd like to point out that from my phone there is absolutely no way to import the contacts into Gmail. The browser doesn't display the option to import them from a file, not even when asking explicilty to use the Desktop website. I had to boot in recovery mode, setup USB and copy the contacts from the internal memory to my PC. – Bakuriu Nov 26 '13 at 23:49
  • You are aware that the "import from SIM" part is not talking about the GMail, but about the contacts app? The GMail app does not deal with SIM cards, that's right, nor does the browser :) – Izzy Nov 27 '13 at 06:57
  • Yes, I know that but it's pretty much useless to import them into contacts, since afterwards they are not synchronized with the google account. I had to 1) Import all the various contacts to the phone contacts (creating tons of duplicates) 2) Export the contacts to the phone 3) Boot in recovery mode and copy the data from the internal memory to PC 4) Import the contacts file to Gmail from a browser 5) Format SD (and I had to reinstall the ROM too due to other problems) 6) Synch with Gmail. – Bakuriu Nov 27 '13 at 09:21
  • The tutorial I've linked (and other sources as well) say differently: you should be able to define the target when importing from SIM, and when imported to Google contacts, they should automatically sync (that's what's described there: Now your SIM card contacts will be saved as your Google Account i.e, it will be auto sync to your Google Account.). If that doesn't work out for you, I'm sorry for the false hope I've made (I never tried that myself) – and have to leave the task to someone else, as I'm out of ideas. – Izzy Nov 27 '13 at 12:16
  • The only options I have when exporting from SIM are phone (i.e. internal memory) and SD card. Also phone contacts are not synchronized with google contacts. Maybe they solved this (probably worth defining it "bug" or at least missing feature) in new android versions. – Bakuriu Nov 27 '13 at 14:05