Backing up your phone

[jeffkinn]

I've just seen a message on Facebook from someone who says "text me your name I've lost all the contacts on my phone". This isn't an unusual message and I'm pretty sure that most people don't sync their phones properly and make sure their data is projected. But why in this day and age when it's so easy?? I can never work it out. All the phone operating systems have auto sync routines in place of you want to use them. Most people have either a gmail or hotmail account they can use to sync contacts to. There are plenty of options for making sure photos are uploaded somewhere. Why does it still happen? Is there anything more insecure than a mobile phone that could be lost, stolen or go wrong at any time?

Any thoughts anyone?

[drey_p]

I'm actually quite surprised when I see the "I've lost my phone contacts" messages.  As you rightly say, most phones will back up those contacts automatically.  In some cases I wonder if it is because, in the case of Android devices at least, people haven't actually added their contacts to their gmail or aren't aware that they could.

Even if the contacts aren't backed up automatically, you can export them on a lot of devices so that you can save a file with your contacts to your email or computer. But I suppose that it is down to remembering to actually do that.

[jeffkinn]

The surprising this is that people don't take care of data like their contacts. They must know that they can by synced to another device or a cloud service even if they're not sure how to do it. Why not make the effort to find out and make sure it gets done?

Anyone else here that doesn't take a backup of their phone - customer or anyone from Vodafone? 

[drey_p]

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@jeffkinn wrote:

Why not make the effort to find out and make sure it gets done? 

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I do wonder if part of it is due to the excitement of getting a new phone and wanting to discover the various functions and features, the important stuff like backups are forgotten.  Or perhaps is simply down to the "it'll never happen to me" line of thought?

[jeffkinn]

I suspect partially that and partially an 'I'll get around to that tomorrow' attitude.

[BandOfBrothers]

Hi

I think it's down to user knowledge that gmail and back ups like iCloud as an example have this information in them.

Lots just turn these features on and forget or don't do some homework on their use or panic when something is lost and do not think before looking.

[hrym]

I don't know about other OSs, but Android Contacts apps have an import/export option under the "manage" menu option.  You can create a vcard file on the phone or (usually) an sd card and you can then upload this to cloud storage and also email it to yourself so that you can save it on another device.   This is on top of the Google synchronisation.   I have about 8 backups going at any one time, which is definitely belt & braces.

This is an appropriate place to quote [Jack] Schofield's Law, which states that, unless data exists in at least three places, it doesn't exist at all.   if your phone won't switch on, all those photos are lost if you haven't uploaded or sync'd them elsewhere (Google Photos and Dropbox being the obvious places).

If you do use export, it'll ask if you want to use a password.   If you don't, say no and you can proceed anyway.

[jeffkinn]

I agree that multiple backups are essential. My contacts are associated with my hosted exchange account and therefore lives in the cloud by definition. I have them on a laptop and desktop, iPhone and and iPad. The laptop is backed up to a USB drive as well as another online cloud service as is the desktop to the same service but in another bucket as it were. My calendar and emails are exactly the same.

My photos are on the phone, laptop, desktop and all the same backup locations either physical or in the cloud as well as Google Drive and One Drive.

All of my documents (Word, Excel and PDFs) are backed up on the fly to my cloud backup where I have unlimited storage for £10 a YEAR.

I am in the process of moving to Office 365 which gives me a mailbox of 50GB and 1TB of storage.

I'd have to try really hard to lose anything.