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THIS WEEK ON Live A Better Life, we’re looking at all things tech, and bringing you expert info on how to make the tech side of smartphone ownership a cinch.
Today, we’re tackling something that a lot of us ignore: backing up our phones.
Live A Better Life is all about making your phone work for you, and backup is essential for having a harmonious relationship with your phone.
Why? Well for one thing, just think of the huge amounts of data you have on your phone: photos of family and friends, voice memos, videos, all sorts of things.
What if you lost or broke your phone tomorrow? Then some of your data could be gone forever.
As MacWorld puts it:
Backing up your iPad or iPhone is easy to do, and it’s also incredibly important – if we had to give three pieces of advice to iPhone (and iPad) owners, they would be back up, back up, back up.
Or as two of our staff members here put it:
I lost loads of photos of my dog that died. Now I backup everything.
I lost all my WhatsApp chats a couple of months ago. In some ways it was a nice, enforced detox but in other ways I felt like I lost a written history.
Apples and Androids
If you’re an Apple user, Apple says that:
If you back up your iPhone, iPad or iPod touch, you’ll have a copy of your information to use in case your device is ever replaced, lost, or damaged.
But first, you must choose a backup method: iCloud and iTunes. Here’s a page that outlines the difference between them. You can make a backup in both, if you want.
Here’s the full guide to backing up with iCloud or iTunes. The first thing you need to know is that connecting to a wifi network is pretty much essential for this.
You can increase storage in your iCloud – but it costs money. Here’s more info on that.
If you like to backup your phone using iTunes, make sure to store your password somewhere safe, because as Apple says, “there’s no way to recover your iTunes backups without this password”. If you want to save your Health and Activity data, you need to encrypt your backup.
If you’re an Android user, you’ll know that your Google account comes in very handy for backing things up.
The backup is pretty simple – go to Settings > Accounts (Google) > Select Google account> and then check everything you want to sync.
Here’s more on backing up Android devices.
There is also Backup and reset, in your settings, which should be enabled. Everything should be backed up to your Google account.
Backing up individual apps
There are also ways to backup some of your most-used apps, like WhatsApp. There is an option to backup your chat history depending on what phone you have.
On some phones, you’ll need to make sure to manually backup those chats before you uninstall the app.
If you want to backup your photos, use something like Google Photos or Dropbox, which enable you to access your photos from a PC or mobile device. Google Photos in particular comes highly recommended by our team in here.
One way to wirelessly transfer photos and videos is the Photosync app, which also comes recommended by staff in here. It can be used across a range of devices and computers.
Do you backup your phone regularly? Tell us in the comments.
This must be some kind of joke, right?
Crowd funding by it’s very nature is usually consumer-centric. So I would imagine this is a bad suggestion for a B2B SME. And a lot of SME’s in Ireland are B2B.
Is there a crowd funding platform out there that isn’t consumer-centric and is based on getting shares for investment?
You’re looking more at angel investor route there. You could also look at a co-destiny arrangement with significant customers. That is where there is extremely close cooperation between a service provider and a customer such that they are almost one (e.g. A well functioning outsourcing arrangement). In such a scenario, your customer may work with you and help you grow your business as the rate of return for spare funds in a bank is so poor at the moment.
Contact me on twitter if you have any questions and I can talk you through a few things if you want.
NEWFLASH FROM ERSI….Banks are shite, banks are shite!! Just whats needed…the out of touch preaching to the untouchables!!
The very fact that Dr?? Martina Lawless would suggest Crowdfunding as a viable option for anything over 1-2% of SMEs in Ireland shows her and her organisation’s detachment from reality…The ERSI is the place that needs to ‘catch up’ and give some real alternatives to the banking sewer that is the unavoidable staple for so many self-employed and SMEs in Ireland.
The idea of borrowing from tax-funded bailed-out banks so you can make money to pay them interest and pay more taxes on any profit you make to pay ad finites for their bail-out is insane!
Really? You seem to have a loose grasp on business there.
The options are very straight forward:
Bank loan: will seek concomitant funding and/or security over loan against personal assets. Benefit is funding / risk is losing it all.
Equity swap: in return for a capital injection from a private investor or investors, a business gets access to funding but loses some of its independence. This is not necessarily a bad thing but it does mean you pay an awfully high price for what can be a modest level of start-up funding if you become successful. It just depends on how confident you are about your business and how much you’re willing to relinquish to have a shot at success.
Co-destiny funding: two businesses share business expansion plans and without formally joining help each other realise each other’s expansion plans. One may have spare cash that they are willing to advance because of the close relationship for a reasonable return like 5%. The other gets the funding and can expand operations such that it can take on new customers and build the size and scale to be able to support their co-destiny partner’s business.
Flotation: alternative investment markets for products and service but this tends to be down the line.
Crowd-funding: raise small amounts of modest funding levels in return for equity or some kind of benefit in kind.
There aren’t too many other ways to do this beside merging and then losing independence. Sin é, that’s it. So there aren’t alternatives. Besides it’s not ESRI’s job to innovate, it is a SMEs job to find a way.
@robespierre. Your post is informative and succinct but I fear from its tone that you may give your advice from behind a desk(no offence meant and apologies if I am wrong). The options you speak of all infer a loss of independence to some degree and if you have worked, planned, saved, discussed ad nauseam every detail of your start up/expansion/survival, I fear the way you have delivered the options to finance in your post would not be so ‘clinical’. I have listened to many advisors who never took the ownership/self-employed plunge, and they all had answers from a book but never from experience unfortunately. Re ERSI, you are right, they are not the innovators, however may I suggest that they should just give the facts then, not opinion, and allow us, the innovators, to decide for ourselves without the gratuitous dog-on-the-street ‘advice’.
Nope, I left a well paid position in a tier one consultancy to run my own business. I am building from a modest base of my own savings and am running one business (an advisory one) to build the business I quit to set-up primarily through equity sharing with individuals I convince to take the jump with me.
The options are simple and few and that may seem clinical. Simple and easy are two very different things however.
Absolutely correct but when 50% have now website and a large amount of the other simply have a magazine sites crowd funding is like going to mars.
Ultimately it’s adapt or die. Micro financing and crowd sourcing or angel investors are a great bet but so many small businesses offer generic services without significant differentiation that this kind investment is not really relevant. On the product side crowd sourcing is easier and more obvious but generational mind sets can affect this.
Finally, as a small business owner, we’re right to be wary of banks. The first thing they look for is a personal guarantee or a hold over your family home. We’ve seen how that has worked out over the past 7 years.
My top tip is I give a 10% discount for half the money up front. It means I am guaranteed a break even level of cash. While you need loans / capital to expand and build scale without cash you have no business. Bird in the hand is very much my perspective.
It is called invoice discounting and service providers don’t do it enough. It’s harder for products but you may be able to do it on high volume order to reduce non payment risk and maintain adequate working capital reserves.
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