What do you do when your phone goes missing or gets broken?

These days mobile phones do a lot more than simply make telephone calls.

Personally I really on my phone to get me out of bed in the morning and to keep me there (multiple alarms!).

I haven’t got a huge number of contacts in my phone, but the ones I have are probably going to be quite hard to replace.

I got an email earlier today from a colleague in industry who is obviously facing the task of rebuilding his entire phonebook from scratch as his phone was stolen. I don’t envy him!

So what are the options for people?

Are there any sane online backup solutions that people can use?

I know there was one Irish company trying to do something in this area, but they stopped answering my emails when I queried the veracity of their claims (which I would do when it comes to storing important data – wouldn’t you?)

Has anyone used an online service for this and if so who?

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By Michele Neylon

Michele is founder and CEO of Irish hosting provider and domain name registrar Blacknight.

21 comments

  1. MyPhoneExplorer allows you back up SonyEricsson phones to a computer – everything from the phone book to the contents of the SIM card.

  4. What Aidan said, I use iSync to back up my sony ericsson to my mac’s address book.
    It’s not perfect doing a restore (entries without a surname get restored as ‘John -‘) but I can live with that. It’s saved me through 2 phone losses.

  6. This got me thinking about the time i wanted to upload my phone contacts to my account on o2.ie where they expected me to open an excel sheet and type every entry in and format it correctly before uploading to the website. Who in their right mind is bothered to do that? Would it be so much to ask of o2 to make this process a little easier?
    However this is one way to ensure they are backed up.
    – i think iSync & MyphoneExplorer are your best bet though.

  7. Another vote for iSync which will also back up to Apple’s .Mac service.
    If you don’t fancy paying for .Mac you can sync the Mac and phone and then cron a backup of your Address Book data from the Mac (and there are third party alternatives)

  11. Michele, have you run the OS X software update? That usually adds support for new devices. Unless you have a really new phone, in which case it will probably be added in the next OS X update.

  15. Vodafone offer a sync service from their Vodafone Mail site. If you log into Vodafone and go to Vodafone Mail in the Messaging and Email section, there is a sync button up at the top. Mine is already setup, so I can’t remember if it allows you to download the app from there or not.
    Niall.

  19. Ja… eyecandy is not their strong side… But anyway they don´t have any obvious direct connection with BigG. I liked the fact that it is quite simple to setup and it uses openstandards, so for example you can get the funambol plugin for Outlook and sync that too (without having to buy an app from a 3rd party like for zyb). It also syncs with GMail and GCal…

  21. I think so… I don´t use GMail, so I haven´t tested it. It says the GMail sync is still in beta, but should be able to fetch “Name, email, note properties”.
    It can also sync with GCal, so if you set it up right and you use Gcal, via Scheduleworld you can sync your phone with GCal too 🙂
    I actually have not being syncing for a while… maybe I should start using it again 🙂

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