An age old questin... contact related

[tspinning]

Let me start by saying, yes I used search, and found nothing...

::Puts on flame retardant suit::

I just picked up a new Sprint (HTC) Touch and am liking it very much. I purchased from Best Buy and they were able to sync my contacts from my old phone (Samsung A900) which saved me hours of hand entry.

I would like to "backup" or save my contacts somewhere off the device, so in my endless struggle to personalize and tweak I don't have to worry if it ends up needed a hard reset or full rebuild.

How do I get the contacts off this beast, or where in WM6 file system are they stored??

I tried Active Sync but without Outlook on my PC it won't look at contacts, I actually went so far as to install Outlook 2003 and setup my Gmail on it, only to encounter an issue of
Attention Required:
cannot sync w/ outlook profile you are using because a different profile was previously setup or the profile is password-protected.

Please open outlook using the appropriate profile

Support Code 8503001f




*note I would like to know this for future reference, I removed my device from active sync, re-added it, did a sync, and as I feared, wiped all my contacts off the device....