What if you lost your social network?

Not long ago I posted the Do you back up your most important stuff? post, so are you doing it yet?

I thought I would do the figures on social networks this time – not your Facebook or Twitter profile, but the list of phone numbers and email addresses you have stored on your phone. Most people are lost without their mobiles – but it isn’t really the phone that matters, it is the list of friends in the contact list.

schoolies-lorne-560x206 What if you lost your social network?

Imagine if you lost your phone. How long would it take you to reproduce the list? I have around 250 contacts, and if it took me a conservative 5 minutes to get their number from the white pages or facebook or by emailing them, that would mean 20 hours or 2.5 days working full time!

Spending days rebuilding my contact list doesn’t sound like fun – so I make sure that my iPhone backs up in iTunes at least every week so that I always have a few copies. Is yours safe?

By Ross Hill - November 6th, 2009 at 7:06am with 530 views

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  • ugh, i'm horrible at backing stuff up. btw, i found your blog through 20SB's. :)
  • Me too - but I at least back up the essentials now (my laptop with music and
    photos, and my phone contact list).

    ======
  • My HTC Dream, Google Android phone syncs about every day when it does an update.
  • "... Imagine if you lost your phone. How long would it take you to reproduce the list? ..."

    It used to be best practice to ask for business cards then store them on your desk in a nice little container and cross referencing them in your Filofax diary.

    I'd never owned a mobile till this year. I used to keep a backup in a small notebook till I lost that. My phone doesn't use anything but bluetooth and so the only way to get access to the data from the not very practical a) "memorise each phone number by heart" to the dumb b) read it off the screen or geeky c) "backup the simcard at regular intervals the hi-tech way" ~ http://www.wonderhowto.com/how-to/video/how-to-... but thats probably a bit beyond what most would tolerate.

    In the end I just asked the hand full of people I do ring their phone number again. But for 250+ contacts it would be best use an online service to store them & print a couple of lists. But it does beg the question, do you really need to keep all 250 phone numbers in the first place?
  • This is a REALLY important post - how many times have you seen people send those messages around on Facebook that they have lost their phone and need your number. Dangerous and time consuming AND debilitating.

    I now have my contacts synced to my Google contacts - so every time I add a number to any source (phone, web) it all updates instantly.

    I'm living this pain at the moment though, as my old phone (A Palm Treo 750) has my whole contact list for the last 6 years stuck on it, which I can't get off (except for manually copying every number). It could take me up to 60 hours to get all the names off...

    #fail #neveragain
  • "... I'm living this pain at the moment though, as my old phone (A Palm Treo 750) has my whole contact list for the last 6 years stuck on it, which I can't get off ..."

    try extracting the data via the simcard ~ http://www.wonderhowto.com/how-to/video/how-to-...
  • How often do you back up your Google Contacts?
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