Restore Gmail Contacts

Google engineer Amanda Camp:

We’ve added a new feature to Google Contacts that allows you to revert your contact list and undo any mistakes made up to 30 days in the past. Let’s say you accidentally deleted a bunch of contacts or wiped the contact data from your Gmail account by mistake while syncing to another device. Visit Gmail’s Contacts section, select “Restore contacts” in the “More actions” menu, and choose the time you would like to revert to.

What a great feature — takes all the risk out of syncing. MobileMe should have something like this.

Update: Time Machine works for MobileMe users who wish to restore contact data from a sync disaster (and in fact, the Time Machine interface is integrated into Address Book), but only from your Mac, and only if you have Time Machine configured. I wonder how many Mac users have Time Machine running, and I wonder how many MobileMe users there are who don’t even use a Mac.

★ Tuesday, 14 December 2010