The Importance of Back-Ups

As a phone repair shop, we’ve seen a lot of dead phones. Some phones decide to take up swimming as a hobby, others try to play stunt-man by seeing how long they can hold on to the roof of a moving car (as far as I know, the record is held by a particularly resilient Nokia from Wangaratta who managed to hold on for a whopping 12 seconds before it’s untimely demise, (mayherestinpeace) . A great number of phones have mastered the art of altering the very fabric of space and time, rendering themselves entirely more susceptible to the forces of gravity. In an age where we can instantly share our thoughts and ideas across the entire globe from a device that fits perfectly in our pockets and in what this writer can only describe as complete and utter cockamamie, we have yet to see the invention of tiny parachutes for our phones. Inconceivable!

The unfortunate part is that if the phone experiences catastrophic failure and refuses to come back to life, any data stored on the device is unrecoverable (unless you feel like spending several thousands of dollars on highly specialized recovery processes). But this article isn’t about recovering data, it’s about making sure your data is safe before disaster strikes.

Typically, photos are the most important data on your phone, so we’ll start with some of the more noteable services and apps to keep your photos safe. All of these serves work on a fairly simple concept; when you take a photo, it is uploaded to a server somewhere else so you can retrieve it later on.

A word of warning, all of these services will use your data (mobile or wifi) so if you have a skimpy data plan, you may consider extending it a bit to avoid excess data charges or be sure you only use wifi as your data option.

On iOS, the main service built right into the phone’s software is Photo Stream. By default, this service should be switched on, but you can turn it on by going to Settings>iCloud>Photos and turning on photo stream from there. With Photo Stream, you can view your photos from many Apple products seamlessly.

Another app, available on iOS, Android and Windows Phone, is Dropbox. This is my personal preference as it not only backs up photos, but it can backup almost any kind of file. When you install it on your device, it will ask you to choose if you would like to upload your camera roll to the dropbox servers and then it will ask if uploads should occur over mobile data and wifi or just wifi. I personally have mine set up to upload over wifi only. This saves on my mobile data plan and since I have a pretty hefty data plan at home, the uploads do little to affect my allowance. The risk here is if you take a bunch of photos and your phone breaks prior to connecting to wifi, you will lose whatever photos have not been backed up.

And finally, the Google+ photo app also backs up your photos in a similar way to dropbox. This is tied to your google account, so when you sign in you google details to your new android phone, you photos will automatically come across with your login (as long as you have the photo app). I also back up to this service. You can never have too many backups!

Your phone doesn’t just have photos on it though, you may have important text messages, call logs, settings and calendars. For the best backup of all these things (and more!) each phone manufacturer has their own computer suite to perform the backup. Apple has iTunes, Samsung has Kies, Sony uses PC Companion and HTC has Sync Manager just to name a few. A simple google search will bring you to a download page to find the relevant software for your device. It is highly recommended to use these products in conjunction with the other apps mentioned above to provide maximum backup of your important data.

The golden rule is to have 3 copies of your important data; one on your phone, one on your computer and one on a server.

For the more hardcore Android users who have rooted their phones (not the Australian “rooted” but have gained root access to their phone), there is Titanium Backup. This bit of software is basically the benchmark in deep level system backups. This will help you to back up so much more than just your data including system data and deep level user data. The details of this app go beyond the scope of this particular article.

I hope this article has helped you to begin your data backup journey. It’s something that is usually in the back of our minds, but when our phone breaks, it certainly comes to the forefront in a hurry! So, if you do not have your important data backed up, go do it now. Seriously. Do it.


Don't forget to check out our website for all of your phone repair needs! www.techrevive.com.au