Quickly recover Contacts without a full restore

[Guest chucky.egg]

Another question came up about transferring contacts from one phone to the other, so I did a little Google (I'll clean it up later) and came across this:

http://www.outlookcode.com/codedetail.aspx?id=595

It's a VBscript that exports your Contacts to individual VCF files, which you can then use to import on your phone to quickly recover lost Contacts. I'm not sure it's actually any help wth transferring from one phone to another though.

Run the script in Outlook - Tools - Macros, or as a VBS script on your PC, and it generates loads of VCF files (one per contact). Copy those to your phone, and when you want to recover a lost contact you can just open the VCF file on your phone (it asks if you want to save it) and hey presto!

My adapted code:

Sub Export_PAB_to_vcfs()

Dim myOlApp As Outlook.Application

Dim objContact As ContactItem

Set myOlApp = New Outlook.Application

Set objAddressList = myOlApp.Session.AddressLists("Contacts")

Set olNS = myOlApp.GetNamespace("MAPI")


'*** Change the bit in quotes on this line to match your Mailbox ***

Set myMailbox = olNS.Folders("Mailbox - Egg, Chucky")

Set myContacts = myMailbox.Folders("Contacts")


' Get the number of items in the folder.

NumItems = myContacts.Items.Count


' Loop through all of the items in the folder.

For i = 1 To NumItems

    Set objContact = myContacts.Items(i)

    If Not TypeName(objContact) = "Nothing" Then

        If Not objContact.FullName = "" Then

            strName = "C:\VCFs\" & objContact.FullName & ".vcf"  

            objContact.SaveAs strName, olVCard

        End If

    End If

Next


MsgBox "All Contacts Exported!"

End Sub

Now of course we can run VBS on the phone too, so I'm going to have a look and see if a similar process can be used for "on-phone" backups of Contacts (not requiring a PC)

[Guest chucky.egg]

One word of caution -

If you contact name contains funny characters (mine had ":" in them) it doesn't correctly name the resulting VCF file.

The same will also apply to other characters, like |?/< etc

[Guest Confucious]

Outpod is a program that exports outlook contacts to vcf's (IIRC)

http://www.stoer.de/ipod/ipod_en.htm

Haven't used it for ages (I think I needed it for another phone that didn't sync with outlook) but I'm sure it worked OK when I used it. Not at home to try it now.