Protecting your Data and Files

I never repeat this enough; BACKING UP YOUR DATA IS ESSENTIAL. In this day and age where records and all kinds of content is digital, keeping a backup of your most important data is essential. And with several low cost options available, THERE IS NO EXCUSE NOT TO BACKUP YOUR STUFF. I am writing about this as the aftermath of an event that happened last week. A family member came to me with a smartphone that , allegedly, reset itself to factory default settings. This resulted in the loss of family pictures and videos that dated back for over a year, not to mention their contacts and texting history.

So, how is it possible that this happens? Because people are careless and do not keep in mind that hardware and software can fail. Even more so, they do not realize the potential amplitude of damages. Some people don’t know how to, others think that it won’t happen to them. So what can be done? There are many options available, and I will lay out a few. Today I will look at backing up a smartphone and I will write a separate post about backing up a pc or mac.

So you have a smartphone, and you use it as a digital camera and as an mp3 player amongst other features. But what to do to save and secure your pictures videos and other files? There are a few options available, from the automated online backup solutions to manual or software enabled possibilities.

Option 1: Backing up to the cloud

There are many services that can be used to backup your data.automatically. From Drop Box to One Drive and Google Drive. Apple offers iCloud as well. Drop Box offers to automatically backup your pictures and videos to the cloud once your phone is connected to a wifi network. Google Drive does too. This enables you to have an automated backup of your pictures and videos. For Android based devices, synchronising with your gmail will save your contacts and calendar. For iPhone users, you can use iCloud. There are also third party apps available to backup text messages and other content. However, for most people the key is to backup pictures and videos.

Option 2: Manual backup

This is the most time consuming option as it requires that you connect your device to a computer and then copy over the content to a backup media. You also have to be methodical and systematic to do backups on a regular basis in order to not loose data.

Option 3: Use a software

For Apple users, this is really simple as you can use iTunes to sync all of your phone to your computer. For Android users it depends on the device. For Example, LG includes an app to sync your phone. But quite frankly I do not use any of those.

Best solution:

The best solution is to do a cloud backup and periodically back up manually. This insures a double backup and also you will not have to worry about backing up every week in terms of your pictures and videos. Keep in mind that your content is online and can be accessed so keep it clean and decent, unless you feel comfortable in potentially sharing your personal files with unwaranted users (there is very little risk to this BTW.)