The Importance of the Remote Wipe

Ok….so this happened a couple weeks ago. My Family and I were on our way to the cottage when a tire on our car blew. This is always a pain to deal with but in our case, it was worse because we didn’t have a spare and needed to get towed….for nearly 3 hours! Fortunately, my mother in law was able to pick up the kids so it was just Samantha and me in the back of the tow truck.

The cherry on the top of that particular weekend was when I got home and realized that I had LOST MY CELL PHONE!!!! We checked around and quickly figured out that it must have dropped out of my coat as I was getting out of the back of the tow truck.

I don’t mind admitting that I panicked a little. I have gotten to the point that I use my phone in my personal life, my professional life, and for my blog, so losing this tool was a serious blow for me.

Luckily, it was not that serious. Here’s why;

1) everything was backed up to the cloud – I have discussed at length the values of utilizing cloud technology, so let me do it a little more. Because everything on my phone was backed up to the cloud, I really didn’t “lose” anything. My emails, documents, media and programs all have a base in the Cloud, so nothing is “device dependent”. This means that no matter where I go device wise next, I know that I will be able to function normally.

2) I back up my phone regularly – One of the functions of iPhone is that you can backup the entirety of your phone. Personally, I have it set up so that it backs up on a regular basis so that when I change phones I’m able to “restore from previous backup” which sets up the new device like the previous one. I’m not 100% sure if you can do the same type of thing on Android devices like Samsung and Google phones, but if you have an apple phone and if this function exists on Android devices then I would HIGHLY recommend backing up on a regular basis.

3) I used Find my iPhone to Nuke my phone – while I was able to use find my iPhone to locate it, there was no way I was going to be able to get it back. Once we discovered my phone was gone I went in to find my iPhone (I logged in from my wife’s phone) and declared it “lost” and programmed my wife’s number so that if someone found it they would only be able to Cal her and (hopefully) we’d get my phone back. Once we determined that this wasn’t going to happen I used the other function of find my iPhone and sent a “delete all data” message to the phone. The next time it gets powered up and turned on it will erase all of its data from the phone, and all of my data will be secure.

Yes losing your phone is an awful experience and yes having to replace your phone is always a pain. The trick, however, is to make sure that you are prepared for an accidental transition. If you are upgrading your phone it’s always good practice to back it up just before the transition, but you should make sure that your phone backs itself up. This will make it so that if you break your phone, or if it gets stolen then the overall impact will be minimal. Or, alternatively, if you say, for example, lose your phone climbing out of the back of a tow truck…

Just one final point; I got a notification last weekend from Apple telling me that my old phone was in the process of being erased. This means that whoever had it now will not be able to access my information because it will have been reset to Factory settings.

Have you ever lost your phone? What did you do? 

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