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lost android phone contingency plan

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Quick hit: I lost my phone in a cab last night, and while the sweetest kid EVER found it and got it back to me, it made me think twice about my mobile contingency plan. I realized I had a few holes, so I wanted to share what I’ve already done, and how I’m patching the holes. All of these are Android-specific; I haven’t investigated iOS options for my iPad yet.

  • Contacts. All of my contacts are through my Google Apps account for deannazandt.com, so we’re good there.Apps. I’ve rooted my phone, so I use Titanium Backup Pro to create regularly scheduled backups of the application and application data on my phone. The free version sends the backups to your SD card; I bought the Pro version so I could have those apps backed up to Dropbox, too.SMS & MMS. I use Backup to Gmail for this. It automatically sends your SMS, MMS and Call Log to your Google account, and files them in the Archive with appropriate labels.

    Photos. This was the big one for me: I have a lot of photos on my phone that aren’t shared on my social networks. I was mourning the potential loss of some precious Christmas photos, for example. I’m now trying out SugarSync to back these up to SugarSync’s cloud, and then to my laptop; I chose this one because many services wanted to use public social networks for the backup. That was too risky for me. Plus, it seems that SugarSync has good reviews on managing battery and scheduling, and you get 5GB of free space.

    LocatorTara Hunt turned me on to Prey, which is a full suite of services for a lost phone. You can locate the lost device, send messages to it for the finder to tell them how to get in touch with you, and if they don’t comply, you can brick the device.

    Those were the biggies for me. What else am I missing?

 

  



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