Um…seriously? You didn’t bother to back up?

It’s happened again: I’ve had yet another friend that lost everything on their phone when it was lost (or possibly stolen?). “Did you back it up,” I asked. He responded, “Don’t even go there…I hadn’t backed it up for almost a year.”

He lost nearly ONE YEAR of photos, videos, text messages, contacts, app data and more. With external drives and cloud backup being so cheap, I’m truly sad for him and his phone loss but can’t really muster much sympathy for him. Sorry ______ (name withheld to protect the sheepish).  😉

Our entire family routinely backs up to external drives for our iMacs and MacBooks. I’ve set up our iPhones and iPads to automatically back up over WiFi whenever home. But all of that data is then backed up to ioSafe Solo G3 waterproof and fireproof drives (I have two of them: a 3TB and a 6TB…the latter to back up my iMac’s internal 1TB SSD and the 3TB ioSafe drive with files on it). Read more about why I love these drives, and recommend them highly, in this post from last year.

Lots of my archive files are stored in my paid, 2TB Dropbox account as well (which, by the way, is a change to my attitude toward no-privacy-required archive files which I’m now willing to store in the cloud). I sync up or upload files, but I’m also using Dropbox’ selective sync capability so huge, archives of photos and videos stay in the cloud only and don’t clutter up my drives and take up space.

Also, external 1, 2, 4, 6 and even 8 TB drives are laughingly cheap right now so there is simply no excuse not to back up. In fact, as of this writing you can buy this Seagate 8TB external drive on Amazon for only $146!

So please…back up your computer and especially your mobile devices and do something about it right now.

By the way, many peaceful protestors recently arrested in the George Floyd protests still don’t have their phones back and many have been told they have no idea when they will be returned. In fact, with the proliferation of geofence warrants, arrests and phone confiscations can happen even long after a protest has concluded. If they were backed up, those persons could buy new phones and restore them.