If you have ever lost your sim card you know that it has been impossible to recover your contact even if you had your sim card replaced. Losing all your contacts can be very frustrating for anyone and that is why the new service from Safaricom is surely going to be a relief to most people. The service, referred to as Safaricom contact backup, gives both prepay and post pay Safaricom subscribers a chance to back up their sim card contacts and recover them at any time. The contacts can be recovered instantaneously when you replace your sim card after you lose your phone damage it or even after you damage your sim card. Although the service involves backing up contact information online, it can work for both data enabled and non-data enabled phones.
How to set it up for a non-data enabled phone
If your phone is not data enabled, you can backup your contact information by following the steps below.
· If you are a prepay subscriber you will have to dial *100# or *200# for post pay subscribers in order to access the contact backup service which is option 6 on the menu.
· Wait to get a notification from Safaricom to confirm that you want to activate the service and select option 1 to activate.
· After activation go to SIM Toolkit menu then choose contacts Backup.
How to set it up for a data enabled phone
Setting the service up for a data enabled phone is also quite easy.
· Dial *100# for prepay and *200# for Post pay and choose contacts backup option (number 6)
· You will then get a prompt notification requesting you to download the phone book backup application to your phone.
· Once you have downloaded the app, open it and choose synchronize.
The whole process is amazingly fast and takes less than 3 minutes. To save the contacts on your SIM, click on the SIM Toolkit menu, then choose Contacts Backup.
The service is currently free to all subscribers until December 16 this year but normal data charges will apply whenever you use the contact backup application.
After December 16, it will cost you 1ksh for every 7 days and 25 Kshs to retrieve your contact information.
So tell us, have you used this service? If yes, what has the experience been like?
