We’ve all been there; nearly everyone has lost or somehow tragically damaged a mobile. Check out some of the easier ways to backup your phone before some calamity befalls it.

For the vast majority of mobile phone users, the largest expense incurred by the loss of a phone isn’t the cost of replacing a handset, but the cost in data. I’ve been through umpteen phones in my years as a cellular man, and over the course of each transition lost data that has each time necessitated digging through old notebooks for lost contact information and – now in the smartphone era – other data besides.

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The sad fact is, if you’ve lost a phone there’s precious little you can do to retrieve data stored exclusively on the device. We’ve been living digitally long enough now that, for the most part, data need not be lost with the loss, theft or accidental destruction of the physical hardware and SIM. There are means available to those with the need to regularly backup their mobile’s data – and that’s most of us, by the way… and the process can be completely painless. Certainly a lot less painful than putting it off and then being left up the creek without the number of a good paddle salesman.