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Your Precious Data

Your address book consists of the following components located in the working directory:

Core data -- A database file with extension name "GDB" contain essential part of your address book, including contact names, sections, fields, relationships and categories as well as almost all settings. The GDB files is by default located in the Data directory under the working directory unless the Main.INI points to elsewhere.

External files -- While the data fields can store names of external resources like web page addresses and file names, the files pointed by the file names are general stored in local computers or local area network. By default, file names without file path point to files stored in the Files directory of the working directory.

Template files -- While the whole design of Open Contact is very flexible for all users, some users with advanced knowledge of XML/XSL/HTML can modify some template files used by Open Contacts. Please read XML Explained for more details.

The database file is guarded by a long standing database engine called Firebird. While Open Contacts and Firebird provide reliable and speedy services to your precious data, it is reasonable to backup the data regularly.

Sizes of your address books

To test the capacity and the reliability of Open Contacts, we have a few test databases. The largest one contains around 31,000 contacts, each of which contains 20-40 fields and memos, and each of fields contains 5-20 words.

Contact Count Size (KB) Backup Size (KB)
100 1,480 395
300 2,908 1,255
1,000 7,116 3,805
31,000 260,488 127,371

It is not likely that every contacts of your address book contain 20-30 fields and memos. The test databases are mostly for stress tests. The size of your address book is generally much smaller. We have another test address book with emulated contact info of 11,193 records, each of which has around 11 dynamic fields. The size of the database is 22,792KB (2KB per record), and the size of the backup file is 11,188KB.