Device Crash!

I talked a bit about Technology Fails a few months ago, and this post is somewhat related. How often do you back up your phone? What do you do if and when your phone or computer goes kaput? This is all about the device crash – when our devices completely fail us and we lose everything.

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Device crash is the worst!

My daughter has a hand-me-down cell phone, a very nice iPhone X with lots of storage that was her dad’s phone before her. My husband is pretty hard on devices, but the phone still had lots of wear left when we gave it to her.

Lately, though, it has not been charging very well and the battery life was less than fabulous. She has had to hold the charger just right or use the flat charging pad – which she doesn’t like to carry around everywhere.

She’s been asking for a new phone, and I’ve been putting her off – trying to hold off until the new iPhone is released and thus hopeful that the 12 or whichever version she desperately wants goes down in price a bit.

Fast forward to this weekend. The teenager has done her research, and finally talked me into just buying the new phone. I took her to the Verizon store to get the new phone. And the greeter at the store did two things: 1) she tried to talk my kid into waiting for the new iPhone release to either get that or get the current version at a lower price; and 2) asked to look at the current phone, and proceeded to clean out the charging port with the little Apple tool they give you to open the SIM card slot.

That’s right – she stuck that little metal thing into the charger and dug around for lint. Then when we still wanted to buy a new phone, she added us to a wait list, and we waited for almost 30 minutes to talk to a sales rep. We finally gave up and decided to head home – two hours away – and order the new phone online.

Then, the phone died, and the kiddo plugged it in. And the phone was completely dead. It would not turn on. We took it to a tech in town to see if he could fix it. He did a diagnostic test and found that there was a short – likely caused by the little metal object jammed into the charging port – and something short-circuited and fried the motherboard. So…totally dead phone. Caused by an overzealous lady trying to save us some change.

what do you do when technology fails?

While I appreciate the sentiment (I’m always up for saving $$), the device crash has definitely happened. And – even better – the teenager has not backed it up in months. All of her college application info, college classes, and school login stuff – gone.

Definitely a lesson learned. It’s a good reminder to all of us: back up your data!

I am not a fan of keeping things in the cloud, and I tend to forget to back my devices up regularly. I do keep a large (2T) external hard drive for photos – and I back up all of them by month and year on a regular basis. If you are in need of such a device, I highly recommend this one on Amazon: Seagate External Hard Drive. They have larger sizes also if you need to store videos as well.

Device crash is sometimes inevitable. No matter how well we take care of our things, accidents happen, and technology is never infallible. I try to buy the best things, and I stick with brands that I know and trust, in order to keep this at a minimum. But, life is busy, and we are human, right? Things happen.

Building in redundancy isn’t a bad thing. I guarantee that the teenager will do regular backups from now on. Her dad and I will (probably) back up our phones more regularly as well. At least, until the next time we forget!

Backing up our phones is one of those things that we don’t think about in the day to day. We are all busy people. Life can be crazy sometimes, and we get lost in juggling all the things, all the time. As I talked about a few months ago, sometimes we just operate life as if we’re doing Email Triage and taking care of the bare minimum just to get through each day and week.

mom phone frown face

Our daughter learned a hard lesson this week – and the timing really stunk since it was the day before the first day of school. There is never a good time to lose all your data, but right when classes start and you want to be as organized as possible…not good. Add in that to a teenager, their phone holds everything. Don’t we all keep all of our things on our phones anymore? She was freaking out. I don’t blame her.

Life sometimes gives us lemons. Device crash is one of those lemons!

Hard lessons are also part of life. This was a big one.

As with everything, we all just have to roll with it and move on. Life continues, we still have to do the things, juggle life, and keep going. Here’s to hoping for some less-exciting adventures for the rest of the teenager’s senior year…

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