ICloud vs Dropbox

Since founding iHospital two years ago, I have encountered thousands of clients who have lost all of their data on their Macs/iDevices due to failed hard drives, water damage, data corruption, theft, etc. with NO back up of any kind. I have always been a huge advocate of constantly backing up your devices by setting up Time Machine on your Mac at home and plugging in your iPhone every night to let it sync with iTunes. However as easy as I make it sound, I don't always do it either. I'm as well guilty of backing up my iPhone no more than once every 3 months. That's a lot of data to be lost between syncs!

The office combined

My iPhone is my life - it has more data on it than on my computers at home or in the office combined. I run the entire daily operations of all of my stores from my iPhone. For instance, I watch my stores remotely through Safari, keep in touch with every project on Basecamp via Outpost, monitor and respond to hundreds of emails daily from 13 email accounts, track all of our inventory and new orders, store databases of photos of every store. The list goes on and on however the story is however the same, my iPhone keeps me connected to my business and is my number one assistant.

This past July misfortune hit. During walking to the iHospital Manhattan store for the day, I realized my phone had shut itself off - in a nutshell. I tried every method I could think of - including a complete tear down of my iPhone 4 and plugging the logic board into a diagnostic unit to regain access to my iPhone data - of no use. Once I received my new phone, I in the near future realized my last backup was over 7 months ago! My data was lost forever.

When iOS5 was released in October, I right away transitioned my existing MobileMe account to the new iCloud. Since I was a previous MobileMe subscriber, I was allotted 25GB of storage space on iCloud. In the settings menu of my iPhone, my MacBook Air, and my iPad, I set all of the storage options for every app to ON. I did not notice the difference in the way I was using my devices with iCloud for several days until a week later when I realized that all of the photos on my iPhone were miraculously in my iPhoto on my Mac and iPad. I downloaded some new Apps on my iPad that night and when I awoke the then and there morning all of the iPads that I had just downloaded on the iPad were as well on my iPhone. I thought it was very handy and brushed it off.

Last week, my heart dropped when I saw my iPhone displaying the message "Your must restore this device". This couldn't be happening again. I cursed myself for not plugging my iPhone into my computer since I updated to iOS5 - I hadn't found a need to. iCloud had been backing up my photos and my apps and music were magically downloading themselves on every Apple device I owned so why would I plug it in?

Bummed, I restored my iPhone to a new iPhone again and braced myself for another work day lost trying to get it back to its former glory. This time something close to a miracle happened. Once my iPhone had restarted afterwards the initial restore, I was greeted with the welcome screen asking if I wanted to restore my iPhone from my latest iCloud backup. YES! The transformation took less than 3 minutes - I watched as every single App downloaded itself back onto my iPhone and placed itself nicely inside the folders I created 3 months ago. I opened my Photos App and watched one by one as every photo downloaded and my albums began to appear with the photos inside specifically how I placed them. I quickly opened my Messages App where I discovered every single text message was there from previously today. Even when I opened my Mail app, there was a half written email that I began writing at noon that day. I was blown away.

iHospital was founded by Dr. Ross Newman, DiD* with one basic idea; provide a large range of repairs and services on Apple® iDevices and Computers with exemplary knowledge and customer service in a one-stop-shop atmosphere. To put it more exactly than repairing every make and model of electronic devices, iHospital has trained all of… View full profile

This article originally appeared on iHospital – iPhone & Apple Repair » iHospital iV and has been republished with permission.

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