One minute, Waleed Bishouty, 21, was fishing his cell phone out of his pocket while walking on Upper Wacker Drive. The next minute, the phone had fallen.
To Lower Wacker Drive.
The University of Illinois student was lucky: He was using a pay-as-you-go cell phone and had all of his contacts saved on another phone — not that he didn’t panic a little.
“I went to a hotel, called the [cell phone] company and canceled my phone,” he said.
Bishouty laughed as he recounted his story, one all too familiar among technology users. When a laptop breaks, a cell phone disappears or an iPod becomes a “die-pod,” little can be done to retrieve the information stored on it. Yet there are measures that can be taken to avoid the heartache that comes with lost or dead technology — and more and more people are learning to have a backup plan.
Many cell phone providers have begun to offer automatic backup services should the unthinkable happen.
One of the most recent is My Contacts Backup, a service released May 1 by U.S. Cellular that allows customers with the right software to store and modify address book information online, where it can be retrieved if they lose their phones.
The free service also allows customers to erase all numbers on their lost phone, said Dan Blocker, a senior field market manager for U.S. Cellular, adding that the company has received an “overwhelming response” since offering it.
At the Nokia store on Michigan Avenue, an increasing number of customers have shown they are aware of the necessity to back up the information stored in their phones, said store employees Rob Gore and Bridget Gibbs.
Gore and Gibbs did, however, offer a potential solution should all stored info disappear: Contact the cell phone company and obtain a list of recent calls.
Elizabeth Gonzalez, 23, of the South Side, did just that when she lost her phone during a night out with friends. “We started dancing, and the next thing I knew, it was gone,” she said. “… I went through my bills, started circling numbers that I knew.”
Still, people have an “it can’t happen to me” mindset when it comes to protecting files, said Joseph Adams, a senior assistant general manager at the Apple store downtown — computer users in particular.
“When they are initially buying that computer, they don’t think of [backing up files],” Adams said. “Everyone presumes that their computer already does it.”
As a computer technician who works in the Loop, Gonzalez said she uses an external hard drive to back up data, especially irreplaceable photographs.
“[With a computer crash], you could lose everything,” Gonzalez said.
Francis Kayiwa, the library systems coordinator at the University of Illinois at Chicago — a man who knows the importance of backing up data — named the remote server mozy.com as his preferred system.
Mozy works like other remote servers, in that a software program is downloaded that encrypts and stores files from a personal computer to an outside server. Unlike the case with an external hard drive, which can be lost, broken or stolen, it’s not the user’s responsibility to maintain a remote server. Files can then be accessed through Mozy’s Web site from any computer, provided the user has the correct password.
Mozy currently serves more than 200,000 customers since its launch in April 2006, public relations manager Devin Knighton said.
Gonzalez learned about loss the hard way with her cell phone, and she stressed the importance of backing up files elsewhere, whether it be with a remote server or external hard drive.
“Especially once you get those [computer] viruses, it’s like, ‘please, back it up,’ ” she said.
———-
Sskotzko@tribune.com
