Data Backup Digest

You may have heard the news in September 2012 that a piece of code embedded on a website could restore a Samsung Galaxy S3 smartphone to factory settings. All your settings, apps, photos, music and anything else you had stored would vanish just from viewing the site on your phone. The code could even be texted or emailed to the phone and the same thing would happen. As you would expect, Samsung has now updated the phone software so that the problem doesn’t persist.
It is something to think about, though. Imagine if your phone gets stolen or damaged. If you haven’t got any of your data backed up then you could lose it all in an instant. A survey shows that a third of people have never backed up their computer; it wouldn’t be unsurprising if that figure was higher for smartphones. The idea of always keeping a backup of your files has long been bounded around, but a lot of people would likely not even think about doing it for their smartphone. But when it contains precious photos you’ve taken on it or all your music, the thought of losing all that data would be a major blow.
There are a number of methods you can use to go about backing up the data stored on your smartphone. Apple promotes the use of iCloud, Android of Google+ and Windows Phone of SkyDrive. There is nothing wrong with these, but there are more available should you require a different feature set. Programs like Dropbox, SugarSync and Amazon Cloud Drive all have automatic backing up, ensuring that your data is placed safely in the cloud as well as on your phone’s drive. This is a great method as you do not have to worry about protecting a physical copy of your data. It is stored online, instantly accessible from anywhere at any time.
Of course, you can also perform a backup using more manual methods if you are constrained by your phone contract’s data limits. Simply plug your smartphone into your computer’s USB port. You will then be able to browse all the files on the smartphone (both on the internal storage and on the SD card) and copy them all over to your computer in bulk. How often you decide to do this will vary on how often you use your smartphone, but you should be doing it at least once a month.
Thinking about backing up may seem like a hassle, but once you have a system in place it just ends up becoming second nature. When you compare the stress of losing all your data and not having a way of getting it back versus restoring a backup, it should be obvious which one is better. We are living a digital life and should do everything we can to preserve the personally important stuff that we keep on our phones. Contacts, app data, messages… it can all be restored in an instant should need be, as long as you have a secure backup plan in place.