Best practice: Backup Users iPhones
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Dear Carnival Boy
I've used up all of my 5GB iCloud storage. My phone is full of work photos that I need backing up. Please resolve.
Regards
A. User
AFAIK, there is no corporate iCloud option, is there? So my options are:
- Logon on to his iCloud account and use a company credit card to buy an annual iCloud plan for his personal use.
- Get him to do it, using his own credit card, and reclaim on expenses.
- Use an alternative backup system.
On my own phone, I've tried using OneDrive to backup my photos. It started ok. Then hung. Now the app just crashes everytime I open it. Par for the course, with Microsoft apps. I need something reliable, that works in the background.
I'm thinking about using Google Drive. Any good?
The problem is, iCloud is very good. It's reliable and I like the fact that when their phone breaks, I can just restore from iCloud onto their new device and they're away.
Advice please.
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I'm assuming you are making the business decision?
Definitely a difficult situation. Because this appears to be a BYOD setup, I'd go with a corporate owned google drive account. Ask him to stop syncing the photos with icloud so he can backup his phone to his privately held icloud account. Of course he'll have to buy extra storage there too to perform a full backup as it sounds like he has more than 5 gig on his device. Bit that should be on him, more than likely.
Without that backup, the easy reatores you're talking about don't happen.
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iCloud is going to be by far the easiest option here. I think that Flickr offers an option too.
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You could easily backup to a his local computer. Or create an "Itunes" computer just for this.
Seems like a huge waste of company resources.
Tell him to email what he needs, and delete the rest.
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It's a company phone. I setup users with an Apple ID and password, and no credit card info. They are free to add their own credit card, and I tell them that if they want to do that they should change their password, so that I can't access their account any more. I also advise them that they are free to change their password if they want, regardless (most don't and are happy that I can access their account).
In this user's case, he has changed the password, so I no longer have access to his iCloud account. So option 1 is out.
My initial experience of Google Photos this morning was excellent. However, it appears to have stop syncing now for whatever reason. I'll need to test some more.
Option 2 looks to be the best solution at the moment.
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How is his/her storage allocated? How many APPs does it have, how much space is being taken by the photos? Does s/he need to keep all those photos and such on his device?
If it is a company phone, maybe set up Flickr in such a way that each person has their own folder to upload to on a single account.
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I ran into a phone with IOS 8.5.x and it too was broken syncing to iCloud... so nothing is perfect.
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@gjacobse said:
If it is a company phone, maybe set up Flickr in such a way that each person has their own folder to upload to on a single account.
That's a good idea. A single corporate Flickr account that you set up on each phone. You can set Flickr to auto-upload. That way you can have a central account that IT controls, for cheap, and use on as many phones as necessary or for other things other than phones, too.
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I've always found the Flickr app to be flaky.
So far, Google Photos is awesome. The only issue is that the app has to be loaded into memory for it to sync. If the app is closed (or crashes), then syncing won't happen until the user restarts the app. That could be a problem.
I'm going to give the user the option of using Google Photos using our corporate Google Apps domain or sorting his own life out using his credit card, his iCloud, and his expenses form.
Thanks for the advice, all.
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@Carnival-Boy said:
I've always found the Flickr app to be flaky.
I'm using it right this second, actually. It has improved a lot recently. Uploads fast and reliably unlike the Apple Photos integrated system that breaks constantly doing the same functions.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@Carnival-Boy said:
I've always found the Flickr app to be flaky.
I'm using it right this second, actually. It has improved a lot recently. Uploads fast and reliably unlike the Apple Photos integrated system that breaks constantly doing the same functions.
It may have been the photos,.. but we put Flickr on my wife's phone... she was running out of room herself. It took three or four
daysfor all of them to upload. -
Yeah, I've always found it slow. Google Photos seems considerably faster.
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@Carnival-Boy said:
Yeah, I've always found it slow. Google Photos seems considerably faster.
Have you used the current version? they just updated like a week or two back and uploads are very fast. World's faster than Apple's own upload tools.
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If I find the time I'll do a side-to-side test between Google and Flickr.
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Google Photos. Free. Unlimited.
