Got another email. It drives me nuts, it really does. I got another email from a friend who’s lost their phone. It’s no biggie, o2 are sending them out a new handset tomorrow morning. But she reckons 216 irreplaceable contacts have been lost. She’s managed to piece together about 50 numbers from email messages — but she only just cleared out her mailbox last week to make space (she’s not a Gmail user) so much of her business contacts are gone, gone, gone… until they email her. Arse.
If you’re running Exchange, Good Mobile Messaging, Blackberry or similar, lost/stolen handsets aren’t much of an issue. Get a new one, synchronise it, you’re done.
But if you’re using a normal phone … Let me ask you this: Have you backed up your contacts recently?
Mobyko and Zyb are two companies specialising in backing up your handset’s contacts (and more). You can be backing up your contacts in seconds with either service. If you lose your handset, just re-synchronise your handset and woosh, your entire address book arrives back on your handset right-away. Invaluable and really, really easy to setup. If you haven’t… do it!
Check them out and get your contacts backed up today.
I have gotten that phone call a bunch of times, “I lost my phone, what do I do Jeb?” I always ask if they backed up and inevitably they say no. It is one of the easiest things to do, why don’t people learn.
I have had my number for many many years now and will sometimes get a call from a friend who lost their phone, they start asking me for other friends numbers and I ask how they still had mine. I get the same answer each and every time, “you’ve had your number since back in the day when we still memorized numbers, before everyone had a mobile”.
I’ve got really paranoid about this in recent times, despite the fact I’ve never lost a phone (okay, now I need some wood to touch, as it were). Haven’t tried Mobyko but I have got a Zyb account and also one at MyMobileVault. I find the latter the best at keeping the format of your contacts in-tact. I actually think the best of all so far is Bloove because not only does it sync your contacts and SMS, you can archive old contacts, send SMS and initiate calls through it, over the web. Fabulous. That’s the one I’ve opted for on my wife’s 6120c – and she “gets” it! Brilliant – because she HAS lost phones. Next addition to her handset is the excellent Txt2lock, so when she does lose it, I can shut it down. That gives you a real sense of security!
my n95 syncs up twice per day, provided i enter the proximity of my powerbook. i use ProximitySync, a plugin for Salling Clicker. i think the whole setup cost me about $30 a few years back – i’ve definitely been running it on the last couple laptops i’ve owned, as well as on at least 3 different mobiles.
5 times a day via outlook sync…. and overnight with an automatic encypted backup to the SD card…
I’ve got Shozu set to backup my contacts, but it doesn’t seem to work quite right on my N95 8GB… I lost one or two folk and it started doubling others up…
May I suggest that everybody steer clear of Plaxo as backup software. I have had terrible experiences with it.
zyb is excellent..
Normal people don’t sync their phones with outlook/datacables/n9% autosettings etc (yet).. therefore full credit to these guys for making it relatively easy to use..
A few months back ZYB managed to lose over a hundred of my contacts. It failed to upload them during a sync and then deleted them from the handset on the next sync. Fortunately I had a copy of them in Outlook, otherwise they would have been gone forever. I raised the issue, plus some other bugs I spotted, with ZYB but no one bothered to respond.