Last month I stepped away from my desk for a short time, leaving my phone in plain sight. During my brief absence, someone stopped into the office to ask for directions and left with my phone. It took a while for me to notice it was gone, but when I did, panic set in. After searching the office from top to bottom, my sleuthing confirmed it had been stolen.

To turn this whole unsettling, inconvenient and somewhat expensive experience into a positive, I want to share with you what I learned in the process: Back up your phone regularly!

I take lots of pictures which takes up lots of memory so I regularly use Leef iPhone backup/storage. The good news is that I had backed it up a few weeks earlier so I didn’t lose many pictures. The bad news: I hadn’t backed up the whole phone since December…Our phones are such handy little devices. Everything you need is in one spot. Then the phone was gone and so was most of my passwords. Who remembers phone numbers anymore? That meant I couldn’t get in touch with my kids. Perhaps the biggest loss of all was my appointment calendar. Luckily the disappearance of my phone coincided with a quiet time in my calendar so I was able to remember the key dates and times – it could have been worse.

This is what I am doing now:

• Passwords and important phone numbers are stored on both my home and work computers.
• When I add a new contact, I make sure to back that information up as well.
• I ‘invite my computer’ when I make a new appointment so that I have the information in more than one spot.
• While it is possible to back up to the Cloud (which the Apple Store advisor informed me was about $2 per month), manual backups make more sense to me. I have set a monthly backup reminder on my phone.
• My new phone has considerably more memory but I back up the pictures every week.

Even though our lives are so busy, the little bit of time it takes to physically back up your phone to your computer (and even less when it happens automatically to the Cloud), is a fraction of the time I spent looking for my phone and fretting about the lost information. The moral of the story, back up all of your devices regularly.

While the loss of the equipment was disheartening, the loss of information was much more disturbing and we all have way more important things to think about – like growing a business.