This seems like a weird thing to ask, and just a few short years ago it would have been. But consider how much more we do with our mobile phone than we used to. We still call them phones and yet, for many of us, the phone feature is often the feature we use the least. Do you text people more often than talk to them? Can you remember every person’s email addresses, phone numbers, physical addresses, birthdays, etc? Do you remember all the apps you use and how to configure them again if you replaced your phone? Sure, you’ve bought music and you can always download it again if someone stole your phone, but do you really want to spend a large part of the day getting your new phone back to the way your old phone was?
Setting Up a Mobile Phone Is a Drag
It may seem like no big deal until you have to do it. Once you start restoring a mobile phone back to the way you use it, you realize it’s just like a computer. It can take hours to get things back to normal, and that’s assuming you know how to do it all. In our experience, many of our clients know what phone service they’re with and that’s about the extent of their setup knowledge. Who hosts your email and what are the server settings for it? Are all of those text messages to my family and friends really gone? Surely they’re still out there in “the cloud” somewhere. What does that even mean?
If you aren’t backing up your phone or tablet and anything happens to it (lost, stolen, broken), get ready to lose A LOT of information and hours of your life getting everything back to normal (as possible). It’s an unnecessary risk, and running a backup of your phone even once a month is a simple insurance policy against such an occurrence.
Cheap and Simple
The best part is it doesn’t even have to cost anything. You can pay a dollar or two per month for convenience and automatically back up to “the cloud”. Ensuring your phone is backed up can be as simple as plugging it in to a computer and, for Apple products, letting iTunes make a (relatively) quick copy of the contents for safe keeping. Android users have their own methods, too, but both devices have methods for backing up that ensure the loss of a device is not loss of data.
How Do You Check Backups?
You say you’re doing this, and you ran a backup recently? Are you sure? How do you know a backup ran? How do you verify that it ran successfully? If you cannot provide answers to these questions, we’re here to help.