Update: To backup your Google Contacts for a Google Apps account, start here. To backup Google Contacts for a personal Gmail account, start here.

How many people have you emailed in the past year? How many of those email addresses do you remember off the top of your head? Do you ever worry about what would happen if you lost them? Well today your problem is solved because we just launched our Google Contacts Backup to backup all of your Gmail contacts. You can backup your Google Contacts whether you use our Gmail backup or not. They are separate services.

The authentication process is simple and takes place on Google’s servers, so we don’t see, use, or store your username or password. What you get when the backup is complete is 4 different formats: Vcard, XML, Google CSV, and Outlook CSV. This makes it super easy to import your contacts into another program.

My favorite thing about this is that it is automatic. It’s easy enough to export your contacts from Gmail, but I add a bunch of new people every day as I get emails from people for the first time (I use Gmail personally, and we use it via Google Apps for Backupify). Now, with daily backups, I always have the most recent export available and don’t have to remember to login and do it periodically. One less thing on my to-do list means I am a much happier guy.

So login, visit your “settings” page, and set up Google Contacts backup. Don’t worry about the “beta” status – that just means we’ve tested it, and it works in every case we can think of, but it is possible a few of you will have some weird account configuration that may generate an outlier case. If you have any problems or suggestions, let us know.