back up contacts without icloud

If you're doing Time Machine backups then they should be in your backups. However, it's always wise to have a 2nd backup method so -- select all the contacts you want to back up and then in the menu bar under File you can export as:

• pdf - this will be a pdf list of all your contacts. No good if you want to re-import to Contacts
• vcf - a vcf file of all the selected contacts which, in theory, is importable into any contacts app - or indeed any other app - that uses vcf.
• Contacts Archive - an archive that can be imported into Apple Contacts, but probably not any other app.
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Your choice. vcf is useful cos it doesn't need Apple Contacts to be useful, but the resulting files are so small that I do both, just in case.

You can do similar with Calendar. Notes you can only export as pdf.

Finally - remember that iCloud is not a backup service, it's a synch service, so if you're not backing up your precious data - e.g. photos - then you should be.