iOS - Exchange Contacts – Moving them to iCloud or Gmail Contacts for Free

iOS - Exchange Contacts – Moving them to iCloud or Gmail Contacts for Free

Recently I decided to move from iOS to Android and the search for moving the contacts from iOS to Android started.

First Challenge

I found my contacts in iPod were stored in 2 different groups.
1. My Exchange account (Company email account with 197 contacts)
2. iCloud account (73 contacts)
Most of my contacts were stored in exchange account and I do not know how to get them to iCloud. For moving contacts from iCloud which is easier of the 2 above, you can refer to the blog below. I used the option 2 in the link below to import my iCloud contacts (73 contacts) without any issues.

Transfer-iPhone-Contact-to-Android

I wanted to understand why my contacts were saved to Exchange account instead of iCloud account and I came to know about the following setting in iOS enables that.
Go to Setting>Mail,Contacts,Calendars> Scroll down to Contacts > You will see Default Account.
This was setup as exchange server in my case. So all the contacts were being saved to exchange server group. I changed it to iCloud as soon as I found the issue. Hopefully all the contacts saved in future will be stored to iCloud.

Second Challenge

There is no easy way to transfer Exchange contacts to iCloud :-( . I found the easier way and ton of thanks to Google search engine. Please refer to the steps below
1. Download free version of Easy Backup App from Appstore. Please do not go for any paid apps.
2. From within the Easy Backup App click on Backup button.
3. The system will ask for Full backup of all the contacts with options for Preview, Email and Save in.
4.  Select Email, system will open the email with backed up copy of all the contacts. Great thing about this app is, it actually creates the back up as per the mail groups’ setup.
In my case it created 2 backups, one for Exchange group and one for iCloud group.
5. I sent the email to my Gmail account.
6. I received the email with following files

7. I clicked on Import to Contacts link to import it to Gmail contacts. I did not import the iCloud contacts as they were already imported.
8. All the contacts were imported successfully to Gmail contacts.
9. Once I’ve all the contacts in Gmail I just followed the instructions to import them to Android as per the link provided above (Step 3 of the above link).

Third Challenge (Easy one)

Moving Gmail contacts to iCloud is very easy and you can find the steps in the link below.

Gmail Contacts to iCloud

This way I used a free app to import all the contacts to Android and back to iCloud. You do not need any paid apps to do this task.