Monday, September 07, 2009

Backup your smartphone data


I keep all sorts of important data on my smartphone. I know many people who do the same, but they are not in the habit of backing up their smartphone data. I'm not just talking about syncing your contacts and calendar. I mean other vital documents that may be stored on your internal memory (or even your storage card). Do you back those up? I get in the habit of making a regular copy of all my files and documents on both the internal storage and external storage of my smartphone. I don't want to get into a situation where I need to rely on a data recovery service. Such recovery can be very difficult (especially if you lose your smartphone). If someone takes your smartphone, he/she is likely to erase everything (including the memory card). Once that Flash memory is erased, don't plan on seeing your data again. Most smartphones don't have spinning hard drives in them. I doubt we'll ever see spinning hard drives in future smartphones because Flash memory is becoming so inexpensive and energy-efficient. Did you know that it's relatively easy to recover data from hard drives that get erased? (assuming that someone doesn't use software to overwrite all the sectors)

Speaking of hard drive data recovery, this is a frequent topic that comes up with we're dealing with laptops and servers. One of my colleagues recently had to use a Mac data recovery service for his MacBook Pro. Data is stored differently on a Mac vs. a PC. By that, I mean that the hard drive is formatted differently and you're often dealing with different file formats and extensions. Do you use an electronic health record (EHR) in your office? If you're using an EHR solution in your office and you use a local server for all your data, I hope you won't need any server data recovery services anytime soon. A few months ago, I was involved in restoring a server that lost all its data. Thankfully, this practice had a local backup that was easy to access. In cases where you're having frequent server problems, you may be better by relying on a high-speed Internet connection and using an ASP model so that your data is remote and backed up automatically. If you keep all your data on a local server, make sure you're using several redundant systems to back that up locally and remotely.

1 comment:

  1. Apple makes it very difficult to backup data from Apps. Our app motionPHR a Personal Health Record designed a feature to backup all health data to Google Docs. We encrypt the data and place it in your Google account.

    Another drawback to the iPhone is the lack of a SIM card to store data. Other Smartphone such as Android have these feature so that you can remove the card and backup data.

    So, If you value the data on your phone make sure the App has a feature to backup/export before buying it.

    Jeff Brandt motionphr
    www.motionPHR.com
    www.mymedbox.info

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