Thursday 7 October 2021

uCloud if you want to


I have just bought a new old phone, and am in the process of exchanging it for my even older old phone.

I asked the girl in the shop if they would transfer all the data from the old one onto the latest, and she said no, but she would talk me through how to do it myself. I get a lot of that sort of advice now I have hit 70.

I wearily declined and said that I would do it myself with the help of a forum, thank you.

I have spent years avoiding using any form of Cloud storage, but the obvious way to load up an iPhone is to use iCloud. I have always disabled iCloud on phones and sneered at people who freely hand over all their personal data to a multi-national tech company who will keep it locked up in a mountain - along with everyone else's - to sift through at their leisure using software and algorithms. 

So that night I turned on iCloud on the ancient phone and pressed 'back up'.  It said time remaining, about one hour for 25 minutes, then it said time remaining, 25 minutes for 25 minutes. 

With all my data safely locked away under a Californian mountain, it was time to import the copy all the way over to little old England. That took a mere 10 minutes, after which I had a cloned phone lying next to its brother, right down to the last email, text message and photograph.

I turned on the new old phone and it was as if the old old phone had arranged a surprise birthday party for me, with all my friends and relatives standing on the threshold as I opened the door, beaming inanely at me from the inside.

You get 3 Gigs of storage for free with iCloud. I went to the old phone and saw that I had 2.4 Gigs remaining. The new phone first offered me extra storage for £7 or something, so I turned it off. When I turned it back on again it said I had used over 50% of my data allowance and should really buy some more, so I turned it off again.

The next time I turned it on it told me that the update had failed due to lack of storage space. That's fine with me. I only wanted it to smuggle some immigrants to safety. Now I will turn off the iCloud drive.

10 comments:

  1. I've not got an Apple phone in an Apple phone household. So no calendar to keep abreast of everyone, no geographical information to keep track of the children. No banking apps that work automatically. Clever isn't it all this technology but really, really scary of the powers that those above hold over you!

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  2. I never intend to have my bank details on my phone. Desktop yes, but never a phone.

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  3. I do not understand a single word of this Tom/ Goodnight and sleep well. x

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  4. Is the desktop/phone idea re banking details particular to you ? I have heard the argument go the other way recently .

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  5. I call those mysterious and nonsensical time calculations Macintosh Minutes. You can't use them as an oven timer when baking a cake.

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  6. I deposit checks on my phone, but nothing else. It is a separate app from paying bills, which I don't have. Happy phoning to you.

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  7. Congratulations on your new (old) phone. As long as it meets all your needs, in my book, it's perfect.

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  8. I still use an old, traditional phone which stands on its mount in the hall. It has an answer machine attached which takes messages if I am out. The system works perfectly.

    I do have a basic mobile phone which I only use for outgoing messages in an emergency if away from home. The system works perfectly.

    Why the hell should I bother with a "smart phone" which people seem to spend all their time on - head buried and oblivious to the world around them?

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  9. I have a smart phone..but nowadays it isn't smart enough for most apps! Which is fine..just texts and calls and nothing to munch the battery!

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