Once upon a time, when a person lost or had their mobile phone stolen, there was one concern and one concern alone; that the finder or the thief would start making six hour calls to their friends in other countries, and that you would be stuck with the bill.

With the advent of the smartphone, the lost or stolen phone exposes you to a much more ominous scenario:  Your contacts, emails, photos, music, text messages – YOUR LIFE! – gone, and gone forever.

Granted, there’s lots of stuff out there to help you locate your phone, kill your phone and even take pictures of the thief who stole your phone and have them emailed to you, but none of this really gets your life back.

And it’s not just lost or stolen phones.  What about the phone you put on the roof of your car while you dug out your car keys, the phone you left outside in the freezing rain because you set it down when you were playing fetch with Sparky, or worse yet, the phone you dropped in the toilet?  Gasp!  There are, it would seem, a million ways to lose your smartphone (and actually, your tablet should also be considered.)

The only sure way to protect yourself is to back everything up.  You may already be backing up everything on your phone or tablet to your PC, but that has limitations.  First of all, your PC is not always available, and you’re not likely to be overly diligent about backing up every day, or even every week.  In addition, if you’re uploading a lot of bandwidth intensive content to your PC, you may affect its performance over the long term.

There’s got to be a better way.  And, fortunately, there is.  It’s called online backup, and it’s provided by companies like ElephantDrive. And it’s not just for business, or sophisticated technology types.  It’s for everyone who wants to protect their data, texts, emails, music, and photos — anything resident on the computers.  Furthermore, it’s cheap, and for users with very small data needs, free.  It just doesn’t get any better!

Hey, what do smartphones say to each other when they lose their phones?

 

Losing data and content can be traumatic to consumers, but it’s absolutely devastating to business.

Categories: General