Backup your Phone

As the phone contains more and more important information, it is also becoming more important to back up your phone. There are many ways to do this:

Mail, Contacts, and Calendar:

The firm already syncs your email, contacts, and calendar with Google Apps.  So if a phone is lost or damaged, your data remains available in Google Apps, ready to be downloaded or installed on a new device.

Be careful, however, calendar entries or contact entries on your phone can be entered either on your margolisedelstein.com calendar or contacts or one associated only with your phone.  If you enter contacts or calendar entries only on your phone, they will not be synced to Google Apps and will not be backed up.  There is a setting when you are creating a new entry.  Make sure you create all calendar and contact entries for margolisedelstein.com

Other data:

But in addition to mail, contacts, and calendar, you likely have many other things stored on your phone.  These could be pictures, downloaded documents, text messages, or information associated with various apps.  Many of these things are not backed up anywhere.  If your phone was lost or destroyed, this data could be lost forever.

Cloud Solutions:

There are backup solutions, but they will require that you set them up.  The iPhone comes with iCloud built in.  This will back up as much as 5 GB of data to Apple’s cloud storage.  You can select what information you want to back up and the phone will regularly update the backup to make sure your data is protected.  If you ever get a new phone, you can simply download your iCloud backup to the new phone and have all your settings saved.

Android phones do not come with a full featured backup solution.  However, Verizon offers a free service called Verizon Cloud which is very similar to iCloud.  With Verizon Cloud, you also get 5 GB of cloud storage space to back up all of your data.  You can select which data you want to upload, so if you have far to many pictures or music files, you can choose to exclude those.  Verizon Cloud can be set up in the red Verizon folder on your phone.  iPhone also supports Verizon Cloud, but since it simply replicates iCloud, it is not installed by default.  You can download it from the App Store.

There is also a third party App called G Cloud available as a free download From Google’s Play Store.  It works similarly to iCloud, accept that you can only save up to 2 GB of information for free, and there is a small advertisement shown at the bottom of the App.  Since Verizon Cloud offers more space, I recommend going with Verizon Cloud.

With any of these app, you can purchase more storage space if desired, but unless you store a great deal of pictures, video, music or other high usage media on your phone, you should never come close to the free limits.  If you have a large amount of music or pictures that do not change frequently, it’s probably better to have those files backed up to a computer anyway.

Backup To Your Computer:

This leads me to the option for either device to back up to your computer.  With the Android, you can simply connect your phone to your computer via a USB port.  The phone will show up as a drive under “computer”.  You can copy and paste any or all of your data into a folder on your computer for safe keeping.

An iPhone can also be backed up to a computer, but you will need to have iTunes installed on the computer for it to interface with the device.  iTunes is a free downloadable program available from Apple’s website for either a Mac or Windows computer.  You can also download pictures and videos only on Windows 7 or higher without using iTunes.

Unlike cloud backups, computer backups will need to be made manually from time to time in order to update them.