It’s incredible how quickly new technologies become absolutely indispensable in our lives. 20 years ago, hardly anyone had a cell phone, let alone a smartphone. Yet today, most of us wouldn’t survive without our smartphones.
Smartphones allow us to accomplish so much from absolutely anywhere. They provide the ability to check your schedule, play music, take pictures, and search the internet wherever you are on a single small device.
In the course of using your phone, it accumulates a lot of data. From precious vacation pictures to your family and friends’ phone numbers, that data is stored in your smartphone for safekeeping. Yet what happens if disaster strikes and your phone fails?
All of that important data could be lost. The only way to ensure it can be saved is with a back up. A back up allows you to store all of the information on your phone for later access. If you haven’t backed up your phone in a while, you need to. Here are five reasons you should make regular backups of your phone a priority.
1. Back Ups Protect Your Important, Irreplaceable Data
Some of the data you accumulate on your phone is easily replaceable. Downloaded songs or videos can always be downloaded again.
This cannot be said for some of the most important files. Whether critical to your work or of tremendous personal importance, if something were to happen to these files you would face a huge loss.
You may end up losing that selfie you took with a cherished friend that you saw for the first time in years. Losing your memories is a painful experience, and it’s one you needn’t go through if you back up your phone’s contents regularly.
2. Phones Are Often Lost Or Broken
A modern smartphone is a double-edged sword. Its mobility is a tremendous convenience, but the small size of such a device also makes it easy to drop or misplace. On average, 45% of smartphone owners will accidentally damage their phones at some point according to W3 Solutions. Drops, bumps, bangs, and more can all shatter your smartphone and render it useless.
In the event of only minor damage from dropping your phone, you’re lucky: you’ll be able to get the data off of it and transferred to a new phone. If you’re unlucky enough to drop your phone in a body of water like a fountain or toilet, you’ll quickly discover that electronic devices and water do not mix. However, you might still be able to grab that precious data. If you’ve backed up your phone to a cloud storage network, you can pull the files onto your computer or next smartphone.
3. Hardware Failure Can Happen
Occasionally, it doesn’t take some traumatic event or impact to damage your phone. A smartphone could end its own life with a sudden software or hardware malfunction.
Just as the hard drive in your computer can crash, that phone you can’t live without might simply stop functioning one day. When a phone’s hardware fails, there’s truly no hope–even a professional can’t bring the device back to life.
If it dies completely, you need to have backed up your data. Otherwise, you won’t be able to get the data off it unless you bring it to a data recovery service in your area, which will cost some money.
4. Data Can Be Accidentally Deleted
Another reason you need to ensure you regularly back up your phone is that mistakes happen. Tech devices are tricky, fickle, and unpredictable at times, and a little hiccup could bring disastrous results.
You might delete a critical file without meaning. Your phone could erase all of your contacts during a restart. Maybe a software update deletes your photos. This can be frustrating as well as damaging if you desperately needed that data. Having a backup to recover these files from can be a lifesaver in such circumstances.
5. It’s Not Hard To Back Up Your Phone
Perhaps the best reason to back up your phone is that there’s really no reason not to– the process is incredibly simple.
You can back up your phone’s data in two ways: to a device with a bigger hard drive, or to a cloud storage center.
If you have a desktop, laptop, or external hard drive, performing a back up is just a matter of connecting your phone to the computer with a USB cable and doing a direct file transfer. Some computer operating systems will even perform the file transfer automatically, syncing the files on your phone to its own hard drive as soon as it’s plugged in.
Want to make the process even easier? There’s an app that can help. There are many different back up apps available for Android and Apple phones. These range from simple apps that can be programmed to simply back up files on your phone to more sophisticated ones that can also back up phone data such as SMS and MMS messages, call logs, and even system settings and passwords. This information can be backed up to the cloud or locally, providing the ultimate “set it and forget it” solution to worries about losing any of your data.
There’s No Excuse For Skipping A Back Up
Don’t allow yourself to accidentally and unexpectedly lose all your phone data. You’re used to making regular data backups for your computer–why would you neglect to do the same for your smartphone?
Your phone should be making your life easier and less worrisome. Permanently protecting your phone’s precious data is a simple matter of downloading, installing, and setting up an app, or even plugging it into your computer. You don’t need to worry about your data if you prepare for the worst now. Perform a cell phone data backup now, and you can relax knowing that your photos, phone numbers, and so many more files are safe.