Rubbing the EmpegBBS lamp here, since both Uncle Google and experimentation have both failed me...

I'm currently trying to consolidate every possible piece of my contact information into my iPhone, so that the addresses and phone numbers of everyone I know are all in one place. This is an ongoing process, of course.

I'd also like to be able to reliably back up and restore this information in an editable format, so as not to lose my work if I ever have a failed piece of hardware, or if I ever choose to move to a different kind of telephone hardware.

Right now, my backup and restore procedure is: Set up the iPhone to synch its contacts with Outlook (my work's email client of choice), then export the outlook contacts to a spreadsheet file that I copy to a file server at home for safe keeping.

This works, except that certain pieces of contact data that are custom-named don't synch with Outlook. Here's an example:

I have a friend living in Vancouver BC who visits Seattle regularly. So that he doesn't get rogered by Rogers, he swaps a US simcard into his phone when he travels to Seattle. So I have two different phone numbers for him stored in the iPhone, each one labeled with a custom name. One phone number is labeled "BC" and the other phone number is labeled "USA".

When I synch with Outlook, I only get one of the two phone numbers appearing in Outlook, the BC number, and it's categorized as "Other". When I export the Outlook data to a file (being careful to make sure all fields are exported), the USA number (as well as any custom labels) are still missing.

I realize this isn't the iPhone's problem per se. It's Outlook's limitation of not having the ability to custom-name a phone number. But is there any other way to back up all my contacts, and all of the custom data, that doesn't have these limitations? Is there some kind of magic intermediary backup file that iTunes stores that contains my full uncensored contact list, something I can just back up myself by hand and edit with a text editor?

Note 1: I've also tried synching with Google contacts, and although the idea of this is appealing, it's got its own set of issues, including similar issues that crop up when doing local file backup and restore of the contact list.

Note 2: My iPhone is not jailbroken, and it'd be nice to keep it that way.

Anyone got any ideas?