Monday, July 16, 2007

Backup address book

No matter how you store your contact info, on paper, PC, PDA or Web, you may have realized the importance of backing up data. If you store contact info electronically, you may sync data between PC, PDa and Web. So if you lost data on one of the platform, you may restore the data from the redundant storages of other platforms. However, synchronization sometimes still stuff things up, resulting corrupted data on all platforms.

Therefore, don't be lazy, and just backup your data regularly.

Use the built-in backup function of OC

This function will use the default mechanism of backup of Firebrid database to make a backup file of the GDB file which store all your essential contact info. The backup file is generally 1/10 of the size of the GDB file. You may then copy the file to external medias.

To restore, run Open Contacts, and run command "Restore" and locate the backup file, then the backup file will be restored and current GDB file will be overwritten with the restored one.

Copy data files

After closing Open Contacts, locate the GDB file of your address book, and copy it to an external media such as CD-ROM-R, as you will do for backing up other important data. If you have contacts with linked files and some custom templates, you may want to backup all content of the user data directory. A recommend practice is to store all these data files into a zip file.

To restore, make sure OC is close, and copy the backup files to overwrite files in the user data directory.

Export to XML

With version 4.1.1 or above, you may "Export selected contacts to XML with options". With the combination of "Categories", "Linked Contacts", and "Settings", you may export contacts, predefined fields, predefined sections and settings into a single XML file.

To restore, open OC and import the XML file. As the XML file preserve all contact info and settings, you may use feed it to other high end information management systems as you expand your business.