I went to itunes, and easily synch’d (uploaded) 70 contacts from my iphone to my gmail contact list, which started empty since I’ve never used it. I was able to successfully add a contact to the gmail list (by hand) and then re-synch with my iphone. Now I had 71 contacts on my iphone and had officially joined the peripherals age.

Then, I uploaded my XLS master list from my PC to gmail, using their instructions, intending to then synch these with my iphone.

I ran into a problem, since gmail didn’t parse the XLS properly, and I realised I would have to pre-process my XLS spreadsheet with better headings, etc. Meanwhile, my brand new gmail contact list had grown from 71 contacts to about 250, but was corrupted. So I wiped it out.

Now I went back to itunes with the intent to re-upload my 71 contacts from my iphone to my gmail account. Problem! It warned me with a curious message that I was about to delete all 71 contacts if I continued. This I was fearful to do, thinking it might be about to wipe out my iphone contacts, which were not even backed up anywhere!

I contacted Apple, with two results:

1) With my iphone connected, there is a commend to initated a backup of your iphone to your itunes account. This is a special archive you can access later, but only one per day. There is a Catch-22 however – every time you do a synch, there is supposedly a fresh backup made automatically. So if you backup, and then sych, and discover you have wiped out your iphone contacts like I was about to do, you might wipe out your backup as well, with the fresh synch.

Conclusion: backup your iphone contacts and then wait one day, so the archive is preserved intact.

1a) Since my problem was that itunes thought my gmail contacts list, (even while empty) was more up-to-date than the iphone list (that contained 71 entries), I tried manually adding another contact to my iphone, to outsmart it into thinking it was more up-to-date, so it would allow me to upload them to my gmail contact list.

Wouldn’t work!

I spend an hour on the phone with Apple, a kind lady who knew very little. Eventually you put a technician on the phone, who immediately knew what to do:

2) In itunes, go to “edit preferences” and then select the button at the bottom of the first screen “reset synch history”. Presto, I was able to upload my contacts to gmail, and was back to square 2 where I wanted to be.

Frank