The Great 'Back-up your mobile data' Hunt

Young_Les

I bought a SIM reader gadget on e-bay (about a fifteen pounds including postage) which plugs my PC USB port. You can read or write the SIM card telephone directory to & from my PC, and as a bonus text messages.

It mostly works. I once had a freak occurence where choosing one contact name from a SIM list dialled another telephone number. SOlved by deleting and re-entering that one contact using the phone.

MSE_Martin wrote:

It's the scourge of modern living, you lose your mobile and there goes everyone's phone number. Well there are solutions both technical and systematic to easily and cheapily solve this problem, so I'm throwing it open to MoneySavers to find the cheapest solution.

The solutions vary from simply organising yourself to write it down in a book every time, right up to www.synchyourmobile.com which for £13 a year allows you to back up your address book to the Internet at the touch of a button wherever you are.

So what do MoneySavers favour?

Click reply to enter the discussion

Delisgran

Hi there
I spotted a Sim saver in Woolworths during January for £4.99. Have n't bought one yet or checked it out in the last few weeks but thought it might make a useful "stocking filler" type present for my offspring for next Christmas!
Hope this is useful. Regards Delisgran

marie_em

rapido wrote:

1. Wait until you get home and retrieve their number on your mobile.
2: 'Write' their number in your 'address book' using what's called a 'pen'
So, stop being so lazy and wasting your money on nonsense!!! (Newsflash: this is what Moneysaving was about - making the effort to save money).

-rapido

I liked that above. :rotfl:
My husband and I like gadgets and that is probably why we are in debt!

What I have done, before I even got a mobile, was make a template in MS word, based on my filofax stationery. (I know it is so.. 1980's) I used to spend a fortune on stationery refills. I now print it out on thin card, trim/ punch it and put it in my filofax. It acts as our phone book in the house.

I've emailed it to my work and can refer to it whenever I need any numbers. I also have set up a mail merge to do address labels for Christmas cards from it.

marie_em

angry wrote:

I use bluetooth, which my phone and laptop both have built in. Connect them together, download phonebook with hyperterminal, convert into Excel.
Fairly complicated, and not very sophisticated, but it's free (if you have bluetooth on computer), and it does the job.

I have a usb Blutooth 'dongle' to conect my PC and mobile. Can I do it that way and convert to excel ?

Simon6776

For Sony Ericsson phones, I would recommend My Phone Explorer, which is free, unless you wish to make a donation. You can back up contacts, send messages, access files, make calendar entries etc, and I have found this program to be better than floAts Mobile Agent, which constantly seems to crash with my SE K750i.

Skyhigh

Time = money.

I have over 400 contacts.
Each contact has an email address, home number, mobile numbers (or two) and work number.
That would take a stupidly huge amount of time to write down.

Entering them into a database or even a simple excel spreadsheet would take an age.


For the past two years I've been making use of my phones bluetooth capability.

You can pick up a bluetooth (100 meter, grade 2) dongle for less than £20 now.
Specifically from ebay, not from the shops - especially phone shops, that charge alot more!


The serial wires are OK to use, but they are slow and cumbersome - although most of them double up as a phone charger, allowing you to charge your phone from your PC.
They are not worth £20, nevermind the £60 some places charge.

You can pick a perfectly good working one for under £5 from ebay, ebuyer.co.uk and many other online retailers.

Theres no difference between the "official" ones and a 'cheap' one, the technology (what little it requires) is the same.

If you are particularily adept, you can even make your own.



Anyhow, I've used FMA (floats mobile agent) for a few years and it works great.
Its better than most paid software I've tried out too.



I have my USB dongle plugged into my PC.
I walk into my room, my PC auto detects my mobile phone - as they are paired.
I open FMA, it loads, it auto connects to my phone.
I click "synchronise from phone" in FMA.

It ensures all my data correlates between my PC and phone.
It downloads my messges and archives them, new camera phone pictures, the lot.
It takes about.....30 seconds for it to download files, etc and update.

Using specialised software also means that you can download (and upload) pictures, camera pictures, messages, music, everything.
Even do firmware updates if you wish.



For most people who use a mobile phone daily, software is essential, backing it all up is essential (although hardly anyone does it).





Why PC software over a device / gadget?

Well, some gadgets costs £10-£30.
A Bluetooth dongle costs less than £20.

These gadgets may store an entire 10 sims - only contact details, no media such as mp3's or messages!
The average PC has 80GB hard drive space.
A full sim backup and phone, including mp3's, videos, music, messages, contacts may take up 20MB.
An 80GB hard drive will easily store 4,000 backups.
This means you can keep periodic backups if you so wish.


Bluetooth dongles, also mean you can connect other phones, back up several phones, connect to other devices in a PAN (personal area network) such as your PDA, printer, anything really!


So cost wise, a bluetooth dongle is most likely the better choice over a gadget which only does one function and stores a limited amount of data.


I used to use a sim-card reader although it proved to be slow and cumbersome (having to get it out, or drag it out every time I wanted to use it.

Also, they tend to only work on one sim at a time, my main problem was:
Say your sim stores 40 messages.
You phone stores 300.
You want to put your messages from your phone, on your pc....

Sim in phone.
Store some messages on sim,
Take out.
Put in sim reader.
Load software.
Move messages over from sim to PC.
Delete messages.
Take out of reader.
Put back in phone, turn phone on, input pin.
Wait for phone to load....
Repeat many times (


Whereas, with a connection such as BT and software, you can simply "highlight all" "save all to archive" or similar. Which I (and i hope other people would) found much *much* easier




:!:

mssjab

I use one of these:

http://www.morgancomputers.co.uk/bargains/detail.asp?ProductID=1909

Aldi were doing recently a Tevion USB SIM card reader/writer @£7.99
I'm not sure if they're still around (I bought one a couple of weeks ago for a friend and my store had loads of them)
I cannot find a picture of one to show.

jcchandler

All phones from three come with a data cable free of charge in the box with your phone.

This allows you to simply plug in your phone and it updates your windows address book. This is handy as from this you can update a PDA (if you have one), and any laptops you have, as well as other phones (including a new phone when you get one).

matty_c608

If you own an orange phone, they have it for free, via the Handset (apart from any connection fees - this I do for free Via Bluetooth over ActiveSync - smartphones).

I can confirm the SPV C500 and C550 have this feature under 'Start, Orange, Backup'

Or you can use a Data Cable, and Outlook. MOST phones will come with a cable and some sort of PC suite nowadays. If not, ebay has cables for many phones for about £5 inc delivery.

Bear in mind that all these 'Sim Card Backup' devices are becoming useless. Many phones hold other details such as emails, birthdays, more phone numbers etc, and are stored in the Phones storage area, rather than the Sim Card. If you backup your sim card, and the numbers are actually on the phone, when you come to restore (If you ever need to) you may have a nasty surprise.

For really good Money Saving, just look after the phone!!!

dave101_2

If you have a Pocket PC then it's worth checking out a program called mPhone from https://www.mobem.com - I can't remember how much it is but there's a fully-functional (I think) time limited demo version whcih I used successfully a few months ago to transfer contacts from one phone (via IR) to the PPC and back to my new phone (via Bluetooth). It worked really well...I really should get round to purchasing it I guess sometime, as its expired now.

dave101