Step-By-Step Guide On How to Download Your contacts From Google Account

Introduction

It's one thing to change your phone and another thing to transfer your data and contacts from the old phone to the new phone. For your contacts, if there is no backup online, it become very stressful to restore.

I remember when i was growing up during the early phase of phone production. That was before i noticed that our contacts can be kept safely on our Google account. If for any reason we change our phone, we will manually copy our contacts from our diary to our new phone.

Gone are the days where you need to write all your contacts into a note book or upload to any paid cloud to keep all your contacts safe. Google account is there to keep all your contacts safe at no cost and no extra effort. All you need to do is to save your contact in your phone and google will handle the rest. Remember to keep your google account backup set to auto-synchronization. This is to ensure that your contacts are backed up on your google account without human intervention.

Phone upgrade or loss sometimes seems inevitable however, saving your contacts to the new phone becomes a tug of war for you, this is where the main work is. To avoid being in a state of confusion anytime you change your phone, ensure that your contacts backed up is set to auto.

If recently changed your phone and you need to retrieve the contacts in your former phone, then my question for you is "do you have google account logged in on the former phone and do you have your contacts backup set to auto-sync?". 

Many people own a smart phone however, it's only few people that knows that you can actually back up your contacts on Google and also download them anytime you need them.

If you are among the set of people that are not aware of google contacts back up, then this article is for you. 

If you have google account logged in on the former phone, you have your contacts backup set to auto-sync and you want to retrieve all your contacts to your new phone, then, read to learn how you can view your saved contacts or download your Google contacts in four simple steps. 

Steps to Retrieve Your contacts From Google Account

Step 1: Check in into your Google Account

Log in to your google account to access your contacts that has been backed up automatically when you saved your contact in your phone. Doing this is simple, you would just have to visit the Google account home page and sign in or just sign to your account on your phone.

Getting to the step above, i assume that you already have an account with Google but if you don't have an account yet, then you will need to go and create one. You can create an account by first visiting Google Account creating homepage and click on Create An Account, complete the mandatory details needed for account creation, then proceed to the next step. Complete the whole account creation process and submit the form. When done with the account creation, don't forget to turn on auto synchronization so you don't have to do any extra thing for your contacts back up to your google account. This is probably a situation where you want to download your contacts from your former google account to the new account you created if you just did.

If you just created your google account, then i assume that you want to start a new backup of all your contacts however, if you need to retrieve the phone numbers that you already had, then check the next step below.

2) Go to the Contacts section

Getting to this point, i assume you already have the Google account, have saved all your contacts to your phone, you have your phone in auto synchronize mode and your contacts have auto backed up. If the above assumption is true, open your browser and head over to Google's main page and log in. You can also do the contact download from your phone.

After you have signed in, Click the Google Apps Dot Menu present on top right side of page. That would be a 9-button small box. It will open up an app list.

Click on the Contacts from the list. This will take you to your Google account's main Contacts section. While browsing from your Mobile, you must be able to find your contacts on people & sharing section of your google account. In this area, you will find all the required contact information for all your saved contacts.

To download these contacts click on the ‘More’ button at the right upper corner of the page. From here, choose the button that says 'Export'. Then you can move to the next step which is downloading your phone contacts from Google. You can use the below picture for reference.

3) Select the Export option

When you are in the Contacts section of your Google account, choose Export. You will be able to see this at the top of your page or on your left side under the menu.

After clicking on the Export option a dialogue box will popup where you can specify which contacts to export. You can EXPORT ALL Contacts or select individual contacts on the list. If you are switching phones, then the option you a supposed to choose here is the export all option. This option will download all your contacts that have been stored in your google account. You can use the screenshot below as a guide.

4) Choose the file type and location

You can choose the file type and save location by clicking on the ‘Export’ button which will bring a pop-up screen, where you get to choose which file type you need and your exported contacts preferred location. For me, the best file type is normally CSV format type and i am sure you will like it too. The CSV file format can be considered as the universal file format because the application to read it with is readily available and import of the file format to your new phone will be easier.

You can choose where to save the file by selecting save to drive or save to computer. If you click on “Save to Drive”, it will save the file in your Google Drive. Click the “Export” button after selecting your preferred file type and location to finalize the process. At this point, your contacts should start downloading and will save into you preferred location. You can use the screenshot below as reference.

Common Problems You Might When trying to Download Your Contacts

While trying to download your contacts from your google account, there are some problems you might encounter during the process. These problems can be narrowed into two thus;

1) Missing Export Button: Since phone make varies, there might be situation where you want to download your contact on your phone however, the export button is missing. If you find yourself in this situation while trying to download your contacts on your phone, the next thing you must do to salvage the situation will be to use the desktop version of Google account. The desktop version of the google account will hardly have a missing export button.

2) Wrong file format: As at the time of writing this article, there are three export options. These options might change in the future. If you have trouble importing your exported contacts into your new phone, then you might need to re-export your contacts into another export format and the retry your contacts import. The export format to use typically depends on what you want to use the export for.

Now, that you've read through this article, i am pretty sure you can export and download you phone contacts now. If you have any question, feel free to use the comment section of this post.