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How to Backup Your Smart Phone
Lucas123 writes "According to a Computerworld story there will be 8 million cell phones/smart phones lost this year. The site describes how to easily back up data on handhelds. The piece also addresses the future of these technologies: 'In Dulaney's opinion, traditional USB syncing "will die." Gartner is telling its corporate customers they should hasten this process by not permitting their employees to sync to their PCs. He explains this by saying that individual end users can create distributed computing and security problems because they are poor data administrators. Moreover, he adds, PCs are not necessarily more reliable than cell phones. Drake gives a qualified endorsement of wireless e-mail as the master application for backing up and syncing data, saying the technology is fine for dedicated e-mail environments but insufficient for corporate environments that require a vast array of wireless applications.'"
all my contacts and sensitive data in the hands of my cell service provider.
"Oh you want to leave, I'm sorry but our backups failed and your data is gone..."
"Oh you decided to stay, guess what, we've found that backup...."
From a backup?
The biggest reason that corporate IT departments aren't particularly respected by the rest of the company is this blame the user culture that seems to pervade it. If there are shortcomings in the desktop and mobile software that makes it easy to get things wrong, then the software is at fault. Software is a tool for people, not the other way around.
Tm
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Ahh the cellphone industry.
This type of backup is nothing new, a provider here in canada has had this style of application for backing up contact lists for over a year now for certain handsets. The convenience of a contact list (read: the inconvenience of losing it) is one of the retention techniques used in the industry here in canada, and i'm sure it is the same in the states. I somehow doubt that having the contacts stored by the provider themselves is going to be at all useful EXCEPT for one specific case: You lose/destroy/etc your device and are getting a hardware upgrade through your existing provider or purchasing out of pocket FOR the existing provider.
Blaming users own inability to herd data securely is a severely weak excuse for removing the one nearly-universal method of accessing the phone's data. What these companies want is to remove any and all data transfers that are not through their own data networks. Why would you want your customer to back up his own information when you can retain control of said information? Why would you want a customer to find a way to upload mp3's directly to their mp3 enabled phone instead of using their mobile browser store?
The rational for this is obvious, and the only sad thing is that the corporate clients are not the ones who will feel the pain. Once it becomes a "Standard" to not have USB file transfers, its the CONSUMERS who are going to find themselves limited to their provider for any and all data transfers (check data plan rates recently? if you do not REALLY need them they're quite the thorn to the side).
This smells to me like a prelude to DRM type control approached from a different angle. Instead of putting the content control in the content, its in controlling delivery methods.
Ice Cream has no bones.
So you want to sync a 1 or 2-gig phone card? 2 gigabytes = 16 gigabits. That's a LOT of $$$.
I'll stick to my USB cable - fast, easy to use under linux - no special drivers needed.
Kevin Smith on Prince