Know how to protect your pics - learn how to back up your phone

This is a too common issue I see on  my social media feed... Dude.. Where's my phone?? and "I hope the person who has my phone will return it?" followed by a =( ..

This to some people is a simple problem with a very simple solution, but to other they have no idea!!!

I don't know if the type of people who always loose their phones even read my blog, and the one who do, this may be common knowledge... or you may learn something new.

Now if you are running iOS (iPhone), then during the setup turn on the "Find iPhone GPS Locator" during the setup of the device. What the location services will do is allow the GPS to track your phone. Most people who own an iPhone probably also own an iPad, this is a very common combination (see my previous blog about tech combinations) of Apple iPhone owners. Install the "Find my iPhone App" which is created by Apple and is located in the apple App Store and it looks like a radar screen (see pic below). What this will do is show you, very accurately, where your phone currently is, thats if it is on and give you the ability to turn on a ringer and also remote lock your phone. If the user has turned off your phone then the service/app cannot locate your lost phone making this section of the article useless. In the event that you loose your phone, you have the ability to "Remote Wipe" (Erase) your phones data and content as soon as it is online. If your not going to get your phone back, might as well lock it up and Erase it so the phone is pretty much dead weight. IOS is loaded with new upgrade features that give the owner a lot of control so in the even of a lost phone the devices is pretty much useless and also discourages thefts of these items because of the tracking.

If you are running Android, then there is a web based service created by Google to help locate all your devices and can be located

 https://www.google.com/android/devicemanager, 

and using your gmail/google account to sign in, all your Android devices will show up on a map also
 utilizing the GPS feature on your phone. this is used for remote locking your phone and also, if used
correctly, stalk your significant other. 

The other issue that I keep seeing in my news feed on Social Media, especially Facebook, is that also with 

all the phones being lost is also the pictures with it. Now the first and easiest solution to this problem is 

to upload all your pictures to Facebook and put them into albums because, hey it FREE storage right!!!

Using the correct settings that is a tutorial itself you can organize all you pictures in albums and it will be there like a vault... also it what Myspace is still used for.. anyway... the less obvious way is to use iCloud if you are an iOS user, however with 5GB storage and 1,000+ pictures, this isn't going to be a lasting solution. 

My recommendation is to download and use Google+, 

even if you don't use this Social Network it is beneficial because of the fact that it will automatically backup all your photos to your Google account and with 15GB and better privacy setting its a better way to go, and best of all it is free. Also using Google+ will keep the pictures in a higher resolution and you can also download them, may take a while, but that is an option where Facebook is not.

So in conclusion.... what did we learn today??? if on iOS enable the GPS feature, if on Andriod remember the android device manager website and also if you want to mindlessly protect your pictures from being lost use Google+ and also Google Drive to automatically save your pictures. It sucks enough that you need to get a new phone, but it sucks more when you loose all your pictures too...

Thanks for reading... and more episodes of the Podcast coming soon...