
Contacts contain a lot of important information about the people you love, the business connections you need, and the services you rely on. Keeping them safe is important. iCloud does a great job at syncing contacts between the Mac, iPhone, iPad, and iCloud.com, but it's not perfect. Sometimes sync goes bad and data gets lost. That's why it's always a good idea to make a manual backup of the contacts on your Mac and keep it someplace safe. Luckily, it's easy to do!
How to back up the address book contacts on your Mac
- Launch the Contacts app on your Mac.
- Click on File in the menu bar and then Export....
- When the menu expands, now click on Contacts Archive.
- Choose where you'd like to save the archive and then select Save.



I save a copy of my contacts archive on both my Mac's documents folder and in Dropbox. This way I never lose it, even if my Mac dies or gets stolen.
Has sync ever let you down? Give Contacts backup a try and let me know how it works for you!
Reader comments
How to manually back up Contacts on your Mac
Thank YOU as always ... :)
yes thanks!
Contact Archives backup tip is a butt saver.
Thank you for your (as always) easy-to-follow instructions that fix or improve our everyday Mac use.
I was told by Apple support engineer that Export does not always work properly. He suggested I also back up by this method: Open Contacts, Click on All Contacts, Select All, Drag the list to the Desktop. This creates a collection of all the Vcards in your address book.
I can't confirm the legitimacy of the Exports-failures, but, I figure, why not take an extra second and do it both ways....
Good information as always. Again, thanks!
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sounds good,thanks for your sharing, but to tell you the truth,the Apple's contacts APP can't convert contacts to different formats,only to vCard,sometimes i need to convert my contacts to excel for a better organization,cisdem ContactsMate can highly and efficiently organize my contacts,it can sync,edit,find dulicates,and convert to various formats,i got it from this link, http://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/52811/cisdem-contactsmate