Phone Data Back up anyone

This weekend I learned a lesson about working on my phone that I’m not likely to forget. My screen broke. The folks at Verizon swear I dropped it. But I know that unless someone came into my house while I was sleeping and swiped my phone off my night stand, dropped it on a concrete floor and put it back… it wasn’t dropped. But that’s irrelevant. I had no phone!

 

Purchasing another phone was costly, but not an issue. My contacts transferred over from my back up system, my apps were all recorded in the app store, my photos safe on my SD card. So… no problem, right?

 

I couldn’t have been more wrong!

 

I used the on-phone memo pad to take notes for use later. I write a weekly blog about the local music scene and often rely on notes that I take when at events. This was a particularly active weekend, and I took copious notes at each of the venues I attended. All of the bands I saw were new to me, so notes were necessary.

 

What I learned was that the memo pad saved notes to the internal memory of the phone, not the card. The sales rep at the Verizon store looked at me like I was speaking Martian when I asked her about retrieving the notes. “We’re not responsible for that.” Crap!

 

Let me just say here that I’m glad none of my memo notes were a requirement for a job. The loss of those notes didn’t cost me a penny. And there was nothing in my notes that needed to be secured. Do you use applications on your phone for business purposes? Where do the apps store the data you enter? Is the data time or security sensitive? Have you thought about how you will access that data if your phone breaks, dies, or is stolen?

 

Today I installed the Google Drive app to my phone. Yes – I swore long ago that I wouldn’t use cloud technology unless I was forced to do it by an employer.  I’ve never been entirely satisfied by the security claims of cloud companies.  And there’s something to be said for keeping certain types of information close at hand. That said – nothing I put on my phone is a trade secret or someone’s personal information that needs to be safeguarded. However, I didn’t like that all my work from the weekend was right there but out of reach. So – Google Docs will prevent that situation from happening to me again. It was a quick/easy/free solution.

 

Not everyone will have the same solution – but it is wise to look for an alternative to applications that just store data on the phone. Perhaps a mobile application that allows data to be stored on the SD card – so it can be backed up to a computer on a regular basis – or another cloud services is what you need.

 

Take a look at your phone today. What is it doing with the data you feed it? Is there a better way?