Backing up your Mobile Phone

If you have every changed mobile phones, you will have to agree that working out how to move your contacts and sms history from one phone to another is certainly not easy. Given most of us change phones fairly irregularly, its easy to forget what you did the last time. Now changing phones isn’t what this blog post is about, its actually about backing up your mobile phone.

I personally spend a lot of time on my phone. I didn’t always, but because I undertake social media work, plus stay in contact with customers and friends etc using GMail, I tend to use my phone to do this work, particularly whilst I am travelling from home to work and back again.

What this says about me and most people I see on the train whilst travelling is that there is lot going on on our phones today that it pays to consider them as a vital piece of technology that requires backing up.

About a year ago, there was lots of talk about viruses infiltrating smart phones and causing damage. This seems to have died down of late. It will make a come back once we start to use our phones more and more for transactions and the crooks of the world work out that they can steal from us via our phones. That’s when you will also start to see security apps being developed to prevent you from attracting viruses, keeping your phone secure.

You might be saying to yourself, well what is the rush, if they danger doesn’t exist today, why should I be backing up? As with everything we talk about on this backup blog, its really all about how much you value your data. If the contacts on your phone are important to you then why would you not back them up?

Consider how easy it is to lose your phone or to have it stolen. Also consider (particularly for smart phone users), the more apps you have on your phone, the greater the likelihood that one or more of them may make your operating system to crash. A reset of your settings could cause you to lose it all. Finally, should your phone go in for repair, you could also be faced with losing it all.

Ways to back up contacts

1. To your SIM card

• Go to ‘contacts’
• Select ‘options’
• Depending on your phone you might need to ‘mark’ your contacts before you copy them over
• Then depending on your phone just go back into your ‘options’ bar and a option that resembles ‘copy contacts’

2. To your computer

• Insert the CD software that was included in your handset box (some phones don’t have it, so you will need to track one down on their website)
• Follow the directions to install software

Once install there should be options to back up your phone to your computer

Software that you can use
This list is by no means exhaustive, but I have found some software developed specifically for backing your mobile phone. Here is a list.Check them out for yourself and let us know via twitter what you think.

• spritesoftware.com (Android and Windows Mobile)
• mobyko.com

If you are using the Android operating system, you will be able to sync your emails, contacts and calendar directly with your GMail providing you with added protection. If this is still not enough for you maybe also consider the following apps:

• SMS Backup
• Mybackup
• Astro FileManager

So go on, back up your phone!