With the continued advance of technology in so many areas, our lives have become a whole lot easier. Photographs are now taken and saved instantaneously rather than needing to be developed. A quick Internet search can substitute for a research trip to the library. However, the fact that everything is now digital can cause its own problems, as I found out during the last few weeks.
After an amazing journey to Germany in the second half of June, I had a large number of photos on my iPhone that I was excited to share with my family and friends. On the last night in Munich, while packing up, a strange event occurred. I had plugged my phone in to recharge it after a long day, and when it reactivated I went over to see its progress. After checking the weather, at almost full charge, the screen went black. Thinking it was perhaps overheating, I left it and went to bed.
The next morning, I could still get no response from the phone. Connecting it to a power cord didn’t help. It was as if my phone had gone from functioning perfectly to completely dead at the flick of a switch. Hoping something could be done, I and my school group flew back home to Minnesota.
Upon arriving back home, and after a trip to the Apple Store, I learned even they couldn’t recover or explain what had happened to the phone. With instructions to see if they could recover the data, I handed over the phone to be sent in for repair. Thus began a week of waiting and not knowing how things might turn out.
On a Friday night, a week after handing it over and coming back from the trip, the sad news was broken. My old phone had been wiped with data unrecoverable, and a replacement phone had been sent. Though still with my many memories, the photos I had been documenting the trip with were gone. Luckily, though, with my text correspondence with my family, 30 photos happened to be saved.
Being the pro-technology person I usually am, this incident has served to severely hurt my confidence in the devices we use everyday, but also served as an important, though unfortunate, wake-up call. I had never had a problem like this with a phone in many years of having one. As a result, and being wary of news events related to Cloud services, I had no online backup. Hindsight is pretty clear on that decision.
I am now prepared for the future, and I would like to share the wisdom gained from my error with everyone. To make sure information is saved, be sure to regularly back up your phone or tablet to your computer. Cloud services work as well but do come with some security concerns. A service I’ve found for photo storage is an app called Google Photos. Once set up, it will immediately save every picture you take to your Google account where they can be viewed and shared from any device you sign in with. If you really want to be safe, save the data you added to your computer onto hard discs.
So if you have a big event coming up or just want to make sure all of those family photos are saved somewhere, be sure to use your resources. Our technology has been a great benefit, but we also need to know just like anything else, it might just fail at the very worst time. Without any Cloud or hard backup, some of the most important things in our lives are now at the mercy of a few functioning circuit boards – or lack thereof. With our lives increasingly depending on our devices, be sure to be safe, and back it up.
Connor Kockler is a Sauk Rapids-Rice High School student. He enjoys writing politics, and news, among other interests.
