How important is your digital data? Every week here at Simpatico we see people using their mobile phones for every aspect of their lives but without having a backup plan in place if things go wrong. Recently we were helping a local businesswoman change her old iPhone to a newer model and noticed that she had not turned on iCloud backup. She had photos of her children going back years and she had never backed her phone up – ever!

All of the major phone manufacturers offer an in-built backup option. Having a reliable backup solution is extremely important. Just take a few seconds to reflect if you lost everything on your phone and it wasn’t retrievable.

Apple provides a service called iCloud. Apple includes 5Gb of storage for free, but if you have a lot of data to store then they charge 79p a month for 50Gb or £2.49 for 200Gb.

Samsung provides a similar service with Samsung Cloud. Whilst the monthly charges for 50Gb and 200Gb are identical to Apple, Samsung offers three times as much storage (15Gb) on their free account.

Other manufacturers also offer backup solutions. For example, HTC phones use either Google Drive or Dropbox storage (Google offers up to 15Gb of free storage, 100Gb for £1.59/month or 1Tb for £7.99/month). LG offers a Cloud Backup service with 5Gb of free storage.

Of course you’re not obliged to use the inbuilt backup. There are also lots of iOS and Android alternatives – just do a google search.

Bottom line – check that you have backup turned on. Speak to us if all of this appears to be in another language, and we can give you some free advice!