Backup Your LinkedIn Profile And Contacts Today!

Steve Tylock

Please consider this week’s “safety” message: backup your profile and contacts today because I said so.

(And even if you have before, it’s probably been too long since then)

And here’s a bug alert – exporting contacts with Chrome appears to be broken…

Old hat

Regular readers will know that I’ve encouraged everyone to do this for some time, and thankfully I don’t have to re-write an article telling you how to do so.

Just read “When Accidents Happen…”

It’s just as valid an article three years later!-)

Broken?

I actually thought this post was going to go in another direction.

You see, when I get an idea for an article I tend to go throgh the steps myself – to make sure I’m giving you the best advice. So I saved my profile as a pdf – check, no problem.

But then trying to export the connections I hit a snag.

  • Go to Connections tab – check
  • Find and click the “Export connections” link – check
  • Select Microsoft Outlook CSV format and click Export – check
  • Enter the Captcha code and click Continue – check
  • See the text “Your connections were successfully exported” – great
  • See the text change to “You connections cannot be exported without captcha validation” – WHAT!?!
  • Try again – putting the captcha in wrong – see “The text you entered does not match the characters in the security image. Please try again with this new image.” – Ok – so that’s what it does when it fails.
  • Try again with the correct captcha code – see the “You connections” error…

And I was going to go into a bit of a rant about breaking the code to allow connections to be exported…

But I went to my firefox browser and repeated things – and the export worked just fine.

So, if you happen to try to export your connections with Chrome and it fails, just try again with a different browser. (I’d replicate with all of the common ones, but don’t see the need – I’ve found at least one that works…)

And LinkedIn: if you’re reading this, please fix it. And consider this bug report on me. You should be able to find it within the software repository by looking for the text string “You connections”. I just don’t think those two words belong together in any normal sentence so you’d want to fix that wherever it occurs… (Though it might make it into some odd novel where connections are beings: “Hey, you connections, just line up over there.”)

Let’s be careful out there

As summer rolls to an end be sure to take some time to backup your whole computing environment.

You know – because systems hardly ever let you know that they’re planning to fail the next day;-)

To your continued success,
steve
—
Steven Tylock
http://www.linkedinpersonaltrainer.com
http://www.linkedin.com/in/stevetylock

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8 Comments

  1. I am guessing this is a premium feature as my LinkedIn account does not show any export option under connections. What am I missing?

  2. John,

    It’s not a premium feature. I’ve never had a premium account.

    But – like the “remove a contact” feature, it’s non-obvious on the page.

    First thought: Use Control-F to search for “export” and it’ll take you there.

    Next: For me it’s in the lower right of the display. Above the bottom toolbar, and in the right third of the screen.

    Good luck;-)

    steve

  3. I, too, have had trouble exporting my connections – no matter which format. The response from LinkedIn:

    Thanks for contacting us about this. What you’ve encountered is a known issue and I’m very sorry for the inconvenience. Our engineering team is working on it but there’s no estimate as to how long that might take. We’ll do our best to keep you posted.

    Debra, in the meantime, I’ll gladly help if you have any other questions.

    Regards,

    Luke
    Customer Experience Advocate

  4. Debra,

    Sorry to hear that – as of this moment, I pulled up LinkedIn and exported myself. It seemed to work, so you might just try again. Maybe it was a service failure right then on that date.

    steve

  5. Interesting, Steve! What browser were you using? Will try with Firefox next (already tried with Chrome and Safari). I’m wondering if the number of connections is an issue (I’m at 6,000+ connections)? Thanks for the encouragement! LinkedIn support response “this is a known issue” ground my effort to a halt. Will keep trying.

    Debra

  6. Debra,

    That was Chrome for me.

    Ahh – yes, I’d say the 6k connections was the issue. Processes that work fine for a few hundred may get stressed for large amounts.

    (And of course there’s the “what can we do to make use of LinkedIn difficult for the mass-connectors” philosophy)

    I have almost 500 connections as noted in my current post: How Many LinkedIn Connections Should I Have?

    steve

  7. Thx Steve. All of which I find ironic given how many LinkedIn requests I received to run my email list through LinkedIn (which I did and it’s large). My best for the Lunar New Year (I’m Hong Kong-based).

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