HELP, I Lost All My Photos and Contacts.

Tech Mom, HELP!!!

An unfortunate issue that comes up more and more often with mobile phones, tablets, and home computers is the loss of all your photos, contacts, and important documents. This issue became very personal to me this week as my husband lost all of his contact and photos during a software update on his phone. He did not have a recent backup or restore point and wound up losing all of his photos and contact for the last six months. With some work, he will be able to get his contacts back. The bad news was that we lost all of the pictures of our son that were saved on his phone.

Accidents, errors, and lost, stolen or broken devices happen. It is also extremely common that during troubleshooting of a device you will be required to restore to factory settings and/or wipe data from the device. One way or another, it is likely that you have or will at some point, lose all the data you have saved on your phone, tablet or PC.

Below are the three things you need to do today to protect your photos, documents, contacts and other data. Here is how to be prepared in less than a half hour:

ONE: Back It Up.

Back up your phone as recommended by the manufacturer. Here are the links to backup directions from Apple iPhone, Samsung Galaxy S4, HTC One, Samsung Galaxy S3, Motorola DROID RAZR MAXX HD, HTC One X+, Motorola DROID RAZR HD, Samsung Galaxy S4 Active, HTC One X, and LG Optimus G:

TWO: External Hard Drive.

Have an external hard drive copy of your computer that you can keep in a safe place. We have an external hard drive hooked up to our computer at all times so that Windows can automatically save a backup copy of our important documents and photos. You can buy a large  External Hard Drive on Amazon.com for less than $100.

THREE: Online Back-up Services.

Use a service like Carbonite. (Check out Carbonite’s current offers).  This is a cheap option to back up an unlimited amount of your data. Online backup services like Carbonite save your files to the Cloud and give you the peace of mind that if your home experiences a fire, is burglarized, or there is a hardware issue with your external hard drive, you have an exact copy of all your data at an off-site location. A great feature of Carbonite is that it also backs up your phones, tablets, PCs and depending on which package you have, your external hard drives.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *