You have to back it up to get it back.

Do you Back-up?

After reading this week about quite a few instances where people hove lost or damaged their phone beyond repair, if the worst happened to your phone are your precious memories backed up?

As most of the people I have read about or tried to help over the last couple weeks have confirmed, its not losing the phone itself that's the main issue its the precious memories that the phone contains that cause the most heartache so, have you got a back up plan?

Most modern phones come with a way to back up the basics, by this I mean contacts and texts mainly, with iPhone you have iCloud that hopefully most of your are using,  Android there is the sync that applies with Google sync and Windows phone offers decent backup and restore process as well, what I want to talk about here are your photographs, what do you use to back these up?

Well here is my recommendation:

I use this service myself and for me it ticks all the boxes for reliable photo back up that is simple to set up comes with bags and bags of free storage and backs up photos at full resolution.

The free account from Flikr gives you 1TB (Terabyte) so you have plenty of storage, that could be up to 2 million photos.  You can also back-up videos up to 1GB (Gigabyte) although they have to limited to 3 minute maximum length.

When you first open the app you will be prompted to either sign in or create an account, you will need a yahoo ID to get an account, if you have one then sign in, if not you can create one at this stage.  Go through the set up screens and you will then be prompted to configure your back-up or in the case of the Flikr app Auto-Upload options.   You should find yourself at a screen similar to the following image.

I would recommend you go for on, obviously! Select Wifi only, this will help to preserve your data use on your phone and it means that back-up will only occur when your phone is connected to a Wi-Fi network, if you are lucky enough to have lots and lots of data on your contract or even unlimited then configure it with Wi-Fi+ Cellular, but I use Wi-Fi only and this is the set-up I would recommend.

From this point on every photo taken on your phone, and photos received will be backed up to Flikr.  All photos up-loaded are private and can only be viewed by you unless you decide to share them.

Should the worst happen and you lose or damage your phone then you can download the photos to your PC or to a different phone from your Flikr account.

You could also use this service to manage the storage on a phone that is struggling with it s memory as well, you could upload photos to Flikr, and then delete the images from your phone to free up some space but these photos would still be viewable on your phone through the Flikr app.

Hopefully this small guide will help to prevent someone else losing their precious memories and help you to take control of your photo back-up solution.

For more help advice please reach out to us at about.me/imaxrepairs.