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Backup phone

10 Posts

Given how we are now totally reliant on out phones, how do people here address the backup scenario?

The battery in my S10e has just “blown up”, lifting (bending) the back of the phone by about 4mm and lifting (bending) the LCD on the front by about 1mm, fortunately without breaking it. This is obviously potentially dangerous. I was told by the repair shop it happens a lot where a phone is charged when in sunlight.

I have an old android tablet which has a £8/month contract SIM card in it and that forms my “phone backup”. It also has VOIP set up on it for when there is no GSM signal (or no network to roam on; not common these days but definitely does happen) but one can get WIFI. After my “blowing battery” I was tempted to buy a cheap smartphone.

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

My backup is my wife’s phone

The same thing happened to a fellow on his Iphone 10.

LFOU, France

Actually I just let my galaxy S9+ down. It started 6 months ago with a dodgy charging ports, randomly loosing fast charge, then USB connection. Tha battery was also giving signs of its age (3yo). I decided to buy and change them, I have all the tools, and 2 days before receiving all the parts, the screen left the party playing the ghost. It became greener and only displays at max brightness.
The cost of the screen here is between 200 (used) and 250 (genuine new)… So after been the most reluctant people to apple stuff, as I have been charmed by my ipad air 4, I got a used iphone11 pro 256 in a repair shop. It has a new but non genuine battery, and apparently the guy who replace the batterie knacked the NFC with, but everything is great, for 520€. Actually it’s brilliant, and that screen is greater than the galaxy S9+. I still have a galaxy S6 as backup phone…

LFMD, France

With an iPhone, the standard backup approach is simply to use iCloud for automatic backup, then if yours breaks you can simply get another iPhone and restore everything directly from iCloud.

EGBJ and Firs Farm, United Kingdom

Except apps which are no longer in the app shop

Otherwise, the Apple backup is very well implemented.

Android is improving but still not really good except for devices with a totally bog standard out of the box config. Unless the phone is rooted in which case it is easy to do a really clean backup but then you lose the use of banking apps (incl google pay) unless you have gone for a cloaked root which is more complicated.

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

I guess people mostly plan to buy another phone.

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

I used to have two phones, one English and one French. It wasn’t very convenient, but better than swapping SIM cards; now with dual-SIM phones now there’s no need. Two different chargers (even from the same brand phone) was a pain too, but this has improved as the connectors have standardised. Anyway, with EU roaming I got rid of my French number a long time ago, so no backup phone.

There was an article in Popular Mechanics about 10 years ago written by a war correspondent. He had an iPhone for normal use, but whenever he was in Afghanistan he would buy two Nokias because the battery lasts for weeks and they almost never break. Maybe keep a new Nokia or a spare old phone (with usb charger) in the plane for emergencies?

On android I turned off fast charging to hopefully stop the battery overheating.

VOIP on a tablet is a very good idea – I’ll set this up.

EGHO-LFQF-KCLW, United Kingdom

I still have a couple of Nokia 6310i phones kicking around. They still work perfectly for voice and SMS and get a signal long after any smartphone has become totally unusable. The battery lasts 1-2 weeks. But you can’t run telegram on them, which makes them not good backups for aviation use.

VOIP (on a phone or a tablet or a laptop) means you can make phone calls without a SIM card. Basically it means a WIFI connection is needed and it has to be one which doesn’t block the UDP packets used in VOIP (a lot of public WIFI networks block a lot of ports). But you can’t receive calls with VOIP unless you buy a number (typ. a few tens of € a year) and have the device running all the time (obviously). I spent a huge amount of time on this years ago and decided that GSM is here to stay for voice calls even if only for the superior incoming call notification mechanism which enables a device to be drawing low power while being continunously capable of receiving incoming calls

Administrator
Shoreham EGKA, United Kingdom

I have a relatively inexpensive (Samsung XCover 4) smartphone I use for Skydemon and as an access point when roaming (Isle of Man SIMs are all roaming in the UK at absolutely eyewatering cost for data – worse still, because they are part of +44, they don’t know they are roaming – so you have to explicitly turn mobile data off when in the UK or you’ll get home to a huge bill. I keep a Vodafone SIM in the Samsung for data, it works really well as a WiFi hotspot).

Andreas IOM

I used to have a backup phone with a separate plan/operator. Now I have a dual SIM phone with two separate operators/networks and a tablet with a sim card for the network I use most.

I bought my last tablet for SD pretty much exclusively, but find myself using my phone all the time nonetheless. Any reasonably new phone will run SD just perfect, so I think my next configuration will be a dual SIM phone and a cheap largish phone as backup/SD. All Android of course

The elephant is the circulation
ENVA ENOP ENMO, Norway
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