Shock-Proof yourself against loss of your mobile phone

 

How badly would your daily activities be impacted if you lose your mobile phone? If you lost your mobile phone now, would you remember the telephone number of your spouse / relatives or friends to call them without your mobile phone? Would you be able to reconstruct all your contact numbers onto your new phone without tearing your hair? If you answer yes, welcome to the club of Minorities !! If you answer no, read on ….

 

In this article, let us look at some tips to ensure that when you lose your mobile, the loss is only of a hardware device and not of your data – neither its availability nor its privacy.

 

Here are some tips to make your life simpler in the event of the loss of your phone:

 

1) Lock your phone’s screen with a strong password offers a good first layer of protection – a simple process which unfortunately very few users follow.

 

2) Dont’ store sensitive information in an easily readable form. Many users store their ATM Card PIN numbers on their mobile under the bank’s name. Storing it on your mobile is convenient but store it in a form that is understable to you – maybe store your 4 character pin as a 8 character number with the 2nd, 4th, 6th and 8th characters being the actual pin – and the full number will then look as a regular phone number and not stand out as a PIN.

 

3) If you use a password to encrypt or lock down your phone, don’t forget the password.  Data protection programs have no “back doors”, and the only recourse is to reset the phone and lose all the data.

 

4) There are many free/paid web services that allows you to backup all your data including the contacts onto a web server or sync it with your computer. Some such service providers are

 

a) Microsoft ActiveSync – free software to sync / backup your mobile phone data to your PC.  Applicable to Windows Mobile phones only.

 

b) WaveSecure (www.wavesecure.com) – Paid service – Lets you backup and restore your phone data, remotely lock down your phone, wipe out the data on your phone remotely in case of loss, track  and locate your lost phone. Compatible with most phones.

 

c) Vufone (www.vufone.com) – Paid service – similar to WaveSecure

 

d) MIQ (www.miqlive.com) – Free service – similar to WaveSecure

 

e) MyLookout (www.mylookout.com) – Free service – similar to WaveSecure with additional antivirus and firewall protection for your mobile.

 

With these tips, shock-proof yourself against the loss of your phone. In my next article, we shall look at how to shock-proof ourselves against an hard-drive crash of your personal PC / laptop.

Comments are closed.