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When Your Company Remote-Wipes Your Personal Phone
Xenographic writes "NPR has a story about someone whose personal iPhone got remotely wiped by their employer. It was actually a mistake, but it was something of a surprise because they didn't believe they had given their employer any kind of access to do that. This may already be very familiar to Microsoft Exchange admins, but the problem was her iPhone's integration with MS Exchange automatically gives the server admin access to do remote wipes. All you have to do is configure the phone to receive email from an MS Exchange server and the server admin can wipe your phone at will. The phone wasn't bricked, even though absolutely all of its data was wiped, because the data could be restored from backup, assuming that someone had remembered to make one. But this also works on other devices like iPads, Blackberry phones, and other smartphones that integrate with MS Exchange. So if you read your work email on your personal phone or tablet, you might want to make sure that you keep backups, just in case."
You know what they say about guys with huge hands....makes their dicks look really small in comparison. I guess the same goes for iphones.
- Your sausage-fingered friend
MS infects your Apple phone like a Sony rootkit and allows an employer to remotely wipe data like 1984 on an Amazon Kindle.
Welcome to your new Pink phone designed in California.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Sorry but while it might be easy to use, it is not idiot proof as you found out. Why the hell did you not have a backup of your data on your hard drive?
Why did you not right go into the preferences and uncheck "automatically sync all devices" before plugging the phone in? It did exactly what you told it to. You could have right clicked on the phone in the device list in iTunes and selected "transfer" purchases which would have at least restored any purchased music.
Seriously though, no backups? Have you ever heard of backups for your home folder? No?
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
You did backups "on the phone"? Do you also do backups of your home folder onto the same physical drive? That would be basically the same concept. No redundancy incase of failure or physical loss.
Backing up a C drive to a D drive that is a separate partition on the same physical drive is practically no backup at all and marginally better than a compressed archive somewhere on C.
I have an incremental backup of my music onto an external drive via "time machine" and I also periodically backup my music collection to a series of DVD-RW discs as added protection.
I assume that I am more likely to lose my iPhone than have a hard drive failure so it would be silly of me to use my phone as a backup.
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
Phones are portable devices and are much more likely to be lost or stolen so you should not rely on them for backup purposes. You are supposed to keep a backup of your important data on a "backup" drive and it is prudent to make periodic archival backups onto removable storage like DVD-R/RW.
You claim to have all of this experience and yet you did not consider an actual backup strategy. Don't take my word for it. Ask anyone on slashdot or any technical forum and they will tell you that a phone is not a backup device. Rather, your computer that you are syncing to is the backup device to your phone data and you should have a backup of your computer onto an external drive.
I have been using computers since the early 1980s in school, since 1988 at home and since 1996 professionally. Even when I was a kid in school, I knew about the importance of "backups".
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
I don't know why we are having this conversation because on sane person would consider their phone a backup of their music collection because of how easy it can get lost.
I feel really bad for you but you should have had an "actual" backup in case your drive on your computer failed which it apparently did.
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.