I’m frankly embarrassed about how totally reliant I have become on my cell phone. Had an iPhone 8 Plus in an OtterBox, which I have dropped hundreds of times. Today it was accidentally knocked from my hand and landed just perfect and the screen is kaput. I have to carry 3 phones at work, and somehow I managed to drop my personal one and not one that belonged to the city.

The phone was probably four years old, so I went to a Verizon store and got a new one for a $700 trade-in credit. Except I’m unable to transfer anything from the old phone due to the screen being broken, and my contacts were not properly backed up. I’ve got stuff from a long time ago and stuff from the last few months, but there’s a great big in between this absent for some reason. So I’m probably gonna have to get the screen fixed on the old phone before I trade it in to transfer the globs of information on it. Calendar, pictures, Passwords, all sorts of stuff.

I’m a fool for not backing up more than I did.

Don’t be like me. Back up your phone.

You can buy a replacement screen/digitizer for about $20. a couple screws and unplug a couple ribbons and it should be good to go. Hardest part would be separating the screen from the chassis for the first time.

That sucks.

I’m a simple user. I actually don’t keep any data on my phone. Calendar, contacts, email are all on the server. I immediately transfers pics to my PC. Music is kept on PC and downloaded to phone (just whatever I’m listening to, not a library). I don’t have any movies or videos, I just stream.

I treat my phone like it will be lost, stolen or broken at any moment.

Must be burdensome to carry 3 phones.

quote:

Originally posted by Nismo:
You can buy a replacement screen/digitizer for about $20. a couple screws and unplug a couple ribbons and it should be good to go. Hardest part would be separating the screen from the chassis for the first time.

For the value of the data, that would be money well spent just to slave the screen and get the functionally in order to transfer everything.

quote:

Originally posted by chongosuerte:
<<snip>>

I’m a fool for not backing up more than I did.

Don’t be like me. Back up your phone.

About 2 weeks ago my daughter was on her way home from Dublin, Ireland when her phone started doing some funky stuff, then shut down. Repeated attempts to restart it proved futile. I took it to our best local phone doctor, the SmartPhone Medics to have it checked out. Apparently the memory section of the motherboard failed, and there is no way to recover the data off of it. They even called some specialists in California that do data recovery for large corporations, and they said the data was permanently lost due to the part that failed!

Well guess what... her iPhone hasn't been backing up to the cloud since 2019, and she didn't tell me! She had thousands of priceless and irreplaceable photos on it, including all of her junior and senior year in college, plus everything she took over 2.5 weeks touring Europe! Thankfully she took a lot of photos with the DSLR that I gave her, but she depended on that phone WAY too much for valuable photos, and now they are lost forever! She also lost all of her contacts, many of whom she now has no way of getting in touch with since graduation, plus many lists of important things she needed to keep.

I hate to hear what you have experienced, but I can assure you my lesson is learned through my daughter, and if my cloud storage ever gets maxed out, it WILL be upgraded immediately!!!

Edit to add: I NEVER use my iPhone to take anything more than simple snapshots! If I'm doing something or going somewhere worthy of some quality photography, I take a real camera; preferably one of my DSLR's, or at a minimum one of two quality Point-n-Shoot pocket cameras.

I'm curious as to why you would need 3 phones at work. That sounds like a PIA. Most folks I know carry a work and/or a personal.

FWIW...https://www.batteriesplus.com/service/cell-phone-repair

Yep, I back up my iPhone and Mrs. Flash's iPhone on a regular basis.

It's the smart thing to do.

And I've carried a cell phone for 11 years at this point and never dropped one. How do you manage to drop one hundreds of times? Just curious.

Settings -> <your name> -> iCloud -> iCloud Backup -> On

I cannot imagine why anybody would do any differently.

I've got my android phone to auto backup every third day to the SD card and the cloud. I've never needed it but it's there if ever needed. It's free insurance.

Jim

quote:

Originally posted by ensigmatic:
Settings -> <your name> -> iCloud -> iCloud Backup -> On

I cannot imagine why anybody would do any differently.

iCloud storage is not free. I use iTunes for backup.

quote:

Originally posted by V-Tail:

quote:

Originally posted by ensigmatic:
Settings -> <your name> -> iCloud -> iCloud Backup -> On

I cannot imagine why anybody would do any differently.

iCloud storage is not free. I use iTunes for backup.

$12/year for 50GB of storage in the U.S.

iCloud storage plans and pricing

More than that, in some cases a good deal more, elsewhere. So perhaps I should have worded it "I cannot imagine why anybody in the U.S. would do any differently."

quote:

Originally posted by Flash-LB:


And I've carried a cell phone for 11 years at this point and never dropped one. How do you manage to drop one hundreds of times? Just curious.

From constantly having to pull them out and juggle answering different ones at different times, mainly.

1 phone is my personal one. All my friends/family/and most of my employees call that one.

Phone 2 is my assigned work phone. That’s how someone would get ahold of me by looking me up in the work directory, call me on my on-call rotation, or how I check my work email. I don’t use it for anything else.

Phone 3 is the shift supervisor phone. Handed off between us at shift change.

I work the busiest division at the busiest time. I’m constantly on one phone, frequently on two. It’s basically 10 hours of stupid.

quote:

Originally posted by V-Tail:

quote:

Originally posted by ensigmatic:
Settings -> <your name> -> iCloud -> iCloud Backup -> On

I cannot imagine why anybody would do any differently.

iCloud storage is not free. I use iTunes for backup.

5GB is free. After that, you pay. Like ensigmatic, I pay $12.00/year for 50GB, which is a real bargain.

If you or a friend have an apple computer you could try to back it up using the apple configurator app.

quote:

Originally posted by ensigmatic:

quote:

Originally posted by V-Tail:

quote:

Originally posted by ensigmatic:
Settings -> <your name> -> iCloud -> iCloud Backup -> On

I cannot imagine why anybody would do any differently.

iCloud storage is not free. I use iTunes for backup.

$12/year for 50GB of storage in the U.S.

How much of that 50 GB does a 256 GB iPhone use? I assume that there is some sort of compression, but how efficient is that?

I’m an old man apparently. My current phone is an IPhone 6s with 32 GB of memory and according to the screen, 7.17 is still available. I’m replacing the family phones so I’m getting one I guess, the smallest memory they offer is 64 GB so I should be good for like ever. Lol

quote:

Originally posted by V-Tail:
How much of that 50 GB does a 256 GB iPhone use? I assume that there is some sort of compression, but how efficient is that?

iCloud backup isn't an image of the phone's memory, used or not. It's a backup of data that exists. It doesn't even back up your apps. On a restore, those are retrieved from the iTunes or App stores.

I dunno, but I really think I'd get a 2nd opinion on that phone. Certainly won't hurt.
.

Might try plugging the bad phone into a Mac or a PC running iTunes and see if you can do a backup.

My personal iPhone backs up to iCloud and I run a synch and backup to my iMac frequently. iCloud stores your data but not your apps. Most of my iPhone memory is music and movies, which are not backed up to iCloud either. 50 GB seems to be enough. However I do not use iCloud photos to synch across devices. My business iPhone is blocked from using iCloud by the company "security" software, so I just back that up to my iMac.

By all means, set up iTunes or a Mac to backup/synch over WiFi.

One caveat is I did a full backup of my iPhone Xs - or updated the existing backup - then traded it in for an iPhone 11 Pro and had trouble restoring from the backup due to some kind of error in the backup. I bought a program that fixed the backup and then was able to restore from it. Year and a half later I nearly lost everything on my iMac because the hard drive was going bad. After an OS update it barely worked (pinwheel of death most of the time), and my Time Machine backup was also corrupted. I managed to create a new user account and port all of my stuff to the new account, then onto an external drive. I think all of this goes back to the hard drive going bad and getting bad blocks over time. Now I am running on a USB-C external with another USB-C external cloned and running daily backups with Carbon Copy Cloner.

Even if you backup regularly from phone to computer and computer to external drive (Time Machine network drive in my case) things can still go very wrong. Hard drive corrupts, then corrupts the backup, etc. So now rule one is no spinning platter drives, only SSD's. Rule two is always do a full backup to an additional external device and verify that your system recognizes it as able to restore from the backup.