How to Back Up Your Smartphones
Do you live in fear that you phone will take a tumble, and you’ll suddenly lose all your photos and music? Tech Talker shows you how to protect your smartphone data.
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How to Back Up Your Smartphones
The beginning of 2016 was a bittersweet one for my family. I’ve mentioned it before, but my birthday, which I celebrated last week, is shared with two of my aunts and a cousin. It can be a little lackluster when you have to sing, Happy birthday dear, Eric, Lydia, Rachel, and Caroline (I promise that I’m not bitter at all!).
During the festivities, there was a selfie mishap and my cousin’s phone landed in a cup of soda. Needless to say, the phone didn’t appreciate the swim and drowned pretty swiftly.
Now in one of my very first episodes I covered how to save your electronics when they get wet. Unfortunately, soda is a great conductor of electricity and before you could say the word ‘Snapchat,’ the phone had shorted out.
The Aftermath
It’s always a little gut-wrenching for me to see a phone dunked before its time. Even more so is when it’s a teenage cousin of mine who has all but been cut off from her world now. Then it starts to set in when she realizes all of the things that are on her phone: homework, text messages, pictures, apps. But it’s all just as safe as your last back up.
Luckily, anything on your phone that is stored in the cloud is almost always safe from these mini-catastrophes. All social media apps, such as Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter, store all of your information in the cloud. This means all you need to restore those apps are your username and password, and all of your pictures that you posted, comments that you made, and everything you’ve shared is safe.
The same goes for note-taking apps like Evernote and office apps like Google Docs and Google Sheets. All of the notes are synced to your cloud account, so the only thing that is at risk is a note that is created and not yet synced to the cloud. This is some pretty heavy redundancy, which is awesome and took a lot of coding work to be as seamless as it is.
The most vulnerable thing on your phone is probably what’s most important to you, and that’s your text messages, contacts, photos, and videos. These items are generally the most missed when a phone goes missing or takes a dunk, and without a previous backup, they are next to impossible to recover. Phones are locked down, so there’s not really any fancy way to recover your pictures or videos. What I mean by this is that if your computer were to get broken there are some tools that might help you recover your files. On a phone this is not the case.
iPhone Prevention
Now how could this have been prevented? It’s easy: just back up your device. The best kind of back up is the one that you don’t have to worry about or really even think about. If it’s a backup that you have to do manually, it most likely will be forgotten and then never done, or at least done sparingly.
You can back up your iPhone or iPad to a computer with iTunes installed by simply plugging in your phone and having iTunes take care of it for you. This will story a copy of your phone on your computer. This makes restoring extremely easy and fast. However, this means that you have to manually back up your phone every single time. This can be a huge pain and, like I mentioned before, will often get forgotten.
The other option that I highly recommend is automatic backups with iCloud. Now iCloud comes with 5GB free of space. However this is a very, very small amount for new phones, which can store up to 128GB of data! If you have 5GB or less of data, backing up automatically to iCloud is completely free and awesome.
Now if you use your phone a lot and have a lot of pictures stored on it, you will for sure have more than 5GB. In fact, at this moment, I’m using 45GB. In this scenario, you should upgrade your storage. It’s extremely affordable, for $1/month you get 50GB of storage, for $3/month you get 200GB of storage, and for $10/month you get 1TB of storage.
For most people, $1 a month is more than enough. If you follow the following instructions, you can set your phone to automatically backup your phone to iCloud when your phone is plugged in and connected to WiFi (which is typically at night). This means your phone would get backed up daily. That’s $12/year for peace of mind and safeguarding your digital data.
Android Prevention
For Androids, this process is not as straight forward. If you have an Android device, you can plug it in directly to your laptop with a USB chord and manually drag and drop all of the files over. This is the manual procedure, so, again, you may also forgot to do it.
If you set up a Google account on your Android phone, it will back up your contacts, calendar, application data, passwords, and most phone settings automatically. However, this does not include your pictures, videos, or texts. To do that, you must set them to automatically back up in Google Drive. Google is a tad more generous than Apple and will give you 15Gb of free space, and for $2 a month they will give you 100GB of space and for $10/month that comes out to 1TB.
If you’re interested in performing a full android backup that includes all settings, apps, and anything else, there’s an app called titanium backup that I’ve used in the past that works really well.
If you have any awesome stories about how backups have saved you, or stories where you would have wished you had one feel free to tell me about it on the Tech Talker Facebook page!
Be sure to check out all my earlier episodes at techtalker.quickanddirtytips.com. And if you have further questions about this podcast or want to make a suggestion for a future episode, post them on Facebook QDTtechtalker.
Until next time, I’m the Tech Talker, keeping technology simple!
