– If You’re as Smart as Your New Phone, Back Up All of its Data
28 July, 2012
I guess that regular readers of this column are near sick of hearing me harp on about the importance of having a backup of important data. Well – in this case we will talk about phones and the amount of important data people are keeping on them. Smart phones are all the rage lately and people are using them for web browsing, navigating, emails, photos, texts, documents and guess what – even for making a call! Only in the last month have I upgraded from using a standard Nokia to a new Nokia windows phone. Basically I gave in to the berating from my techs for being too ‘old school’.
So the windows phone was happy enough to Bluetooth my 380 odd contacts from the trusty old phone – and via Zune software installed on my PC it was happy to talk with my PC. However, I didn’t get along too well with the new phone (mainly because of the small non-changeable font) and decided to get one of the new Samsung Galaxy Notes (for the larger screen). This is where trouble started. These two phones refused to talk directly to each other and the Zune software would not talk to the new Samsung as it only talks to Kies Software on the PC. What follows is a little crazy.
To get the contacts across without retyping the lot, I had to first create a Windows Live account (a web based email account) and sync my windows phone to it. OK – now my contacts were in the cloud with Windows Live. Then I had to export these contacts from the cloud back to my PC as a CSV file. Next I had to create another web based email account with Gmail (because the new Samsung would only sync to that). Then export the CSV file from my computer back to ‘a different cloud’ into the Gmail account. Lastly I had to sync the new Samsung with the Gmail account which got all 380 contacts to the new phone.
All of this took the best part of half a day and I wondered if I should have spent a similar amount of time just typing them from scratch. Seriously – isn’t technology supposed to make life easier? Well now that I have uninstalled the Zune software (also take note of uninstalling software that you no longer need) and installed Kies on my PC, I can sync the phone contacts to the computer once again – in case the phone dies. But I should also be syncing the phone to the Gmail account as well in case the phone dies and I replace it with a different one – like another Windows phone or an iPhone.
I rarely use a phone for more than calls or texts but many people are keeping photos, documents and even important calendar events on their phones – and they are lost if the phone dies. Synchronising these devices with a computer or the cloud makes sure that this important information is never lost. You may be surprised at how much you wish you had done this if your trusty smart phone ever dies or is lost.
Future Byte Me topics can be emailed to [email protected] and Bruce is still contactable at Kerr Solutions, 205 Musgrave Street or on 49 222 400.
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