The frustration of email contacts, backup and Transfer.
Hi everyone, Leo Notenboom here for AskLeo.com. This
is a situation that I found myself in a couple of weeks ago trying to help
a friend whose hard disk had effectively crashed.
Unfortunately, he didn't have a full backup of exactly what was going on.
He had a backup of his hard disk, but not something that I could boot from.
The net result was I had to go spelunking to try and recover some of his data
on the image of the hard drive that I was able to recover.
Here's the problem.
Email we've kind of sort of got a handle on, especially with IMAP.
There's a standard protocol that you can use to essentially hook up any number
of different email programs to any number of different email services.
So that means you can use a number
of different services to read your email, to get your email.
You can see it on different programs, on different devices.
It's great. Honestly, it's wonderful.
I use IMAP and several different email
interfaces and programs to deal with my email.
However, contacts are just not that lucky.
Contacts are, to put it bluntly, a mess.
There really is no standard interchange
format for transferring contact information between different services.
What's worse is that there really isn't
a standard definition of what it means to be a contact.
Yes, I know. For the most part you're probably
thinking, well, it's a name and an email address.
Well, kind of it's a name and an email address, and a physical address,
and a phone number, and maybe some notes, and a place
of employment, and a few more email addresses, a few more phone numbers,
a bunch of more information, you get the idea.
There's no real bound on exactly how much information could be kept as a contact.
So different email programs treat them differently.
I mean, even at this specific level, if you take a look at an address,
a physical mailing address, is that one field that just has the address in it?
Or is it address line one, line two,
line three, city, postal code, province or state, country, all that kind of stuff.
It gets really complicated really quick.
While you're within a single service, it all makes sense,
but as soon as you start to transfer from one to another, things get really icky.
What's worse is that they also all tend
to have different storage formats, usually proprietary.
What that meant in my case is that my ability to recover the data
from this machine that I couldn't boot from is very limited.
There was very little that I could do other than maybe get some names and some
email addresses, and all of the other information in this
person's contacts was probably going to be lost.
Data loss is a common theme here because
when you transfer from one system to another, which you can do,
and I'll give you an example of that in just a moment.
Chances are the data that is available from the service you're moving from
doesn't always match the data that the service you're moving to expects.
Yes.
Last name, first name, email address, those are pretty standard.
But as I already pointed out, how you deal with a physical address,
how many email addresses you're allowed to have, how you represent those
in a transform, that's difficult and there is no standard.
So as a result, what typically happens is
that some of that information gets lost in the translation.
Now, the good news here is that most
of the email services and programs have export capability that goes to a CSV file.
In fact, let's go over here to Outlook.com and I'll show you where that is.
Normally when you're in Outlook.com,
you're looking at your inbox and your email and so forth.
But over here on the left is this thing called People.
Those are your contacts.
And over here for Manage,
you've got the ability to export your contacts, which is great.
I'm going to export everything. And I did.
Right there it is. Contacts.
CSV just got downloaded.
CSV sounds like a nice standard format.
You see it everywhere. And it is.
It's a very nice standard format.
It just has nothing to do with contacts.
CSV is nothing more than a plain text
representation of a spreadsheet, a set of columns and rows.
That's it.
So did this program,
Outlook.com put in the columns that whatever program I'm moving to expected?
Probably not.
So data will be lost either.
Data won't have been placed into that CSV
file that we want, or on the receiving end,
when we go around to importing that CSV file, it won't understand some
of the columns and it will simply refuse to import them.
This is super common.
Now, the good news here is that if you are importing and exporting
to and from the same system, like if I were to take that Contacts CSV
and import it into a different Outlook.com account, probably work.
Same is true for Gmail.
Gmail to Gmail typically works.
And in fact, in Gmail you get a few options of exactly what format you want
the exported data to be in, and one of them is in fact specifically for Google.
But sometimes you just don't have that answer.
You just don't have that solution.
You're going to have data loss.
Now, all I've really talked about so far are these export import formats.
The way you would go to one program,
export your contacts, and then go to another and import them.
As a side note, exporting your contacts is
something that I recommend you do regularly because it's a backup.
You want to back up your contacts every so often.
And in fact, I do exactly that on my Google accounts.
Once a month, I manually download all my contacts in a CSV file.
So what you'd really like is the ability for your program,
say Microsoft Offices Outlook to basically maintain a list of contacts that's
in constant sync with maybe your Google contacts or your Outlook.com contacts.
Some programs have the ability built in, most programs don't.
Some of those require third party solutions.
By third party solutions,
I mean either you'll find an add on for your email program that will
supposedly keep things in sync, or you just won't find one at all.
The bottom line here is that there really isn't an equivalent,
a ubiquitous equivalent for contacts like there is with email and IMAP.
So what does it all mean?
It all means when you find yourself in this situation,
when you find yourself trying to move your contacts from one machine or one program
or one service to another, it's not you, it's the contacts.
They really are this much of a mess, and all you can really do,
in my experience, is do the best you can by downloading or exporting the CSV files,
which you should do periodically for backup, importing them into your other
program and deciding if that's something you could live with.
My solution has been to choose a single ecosystem.
I do all of my work in the Google
ecosystem, be it Gmail or my Android phone, the Gmail app.
That way, pretty much exactly what I want happens.
All of my contacts are wherever I happen to be, but I do not have my contacts.
For example, in my downloaded email
program Thunderbird, which is backing up all of my email more
or less in real time, I still have to manually download
my contacts, and I do that once a month with a reminder.
I hope that helps explain the messy situation.
For updates, for comments, for related links and more, visit askleo.com/147077.
I'm Leo Notenboom.
And this is Ask Leo.com. Thanks for watching.