sampa : colin’s blog

(Updated 2005-3-26: The new Skype 1.2 can now export/import contacts in vCard format, making most of this post irrelevant.)

My partners and I use Skype pretty heavily to do calls and conference calls via Voice Over IP, as we’re all located in different countries.

One annoying thing about Skype though, is that as opposed to most IM networks, where contact info is stored on a server on the network somewhere, Skype stores contact info client-side. This is a major pain for when you need to re-install your system, or when you have two computers and want to have the same contact list on both. In these situations, since there’s no built-in import/export facility, you typically have to write down and manually reenter the details for your contacts.

In terms of a simple backup, here’s an export utility, so at least you can save the list somewhere without having to do it manually. Unfortunately it doesn’t do imports, so getting them back in later will be a manual process.
http://ryanfarley.com/blog/archive/2005/01/14/1439.aspx

Abvoe and beyond that, I’ve figured out one other way to backup the list and copy it over to another computer. Skype has a ’send contacts to somebody else’ functionality. Now you can actually have skype running with the same ID on two computers, which works fine in terms of taking calls (you get a ring on both), but it will not allow you to send contacts to the same ID on the other computer. However, if you register another couple of users aside from your main one, you can on the 2nd computer log in as the 2nd user, send the contacts from the first user to that 2nd user, then send them back to the 3rd user on the first computer, and then send them back to the 1st (main user) on the 2nd computer. Somewhat painful, but the process is probably still much quicker and less boring than typing in 20-30 contacts again. This also works as a backup mechanism…

Let’s hope Skype get’s a real built-in import/export facility at some point. It’s hard to believe it’s come so far without one.