Last week my phone began spiraling.
See, I’m not one of those people who runs out to buy the latest and greatest gadget. When something works, I hold on to it. I’ve had my phone since 2014, and while some folks think that’s not a long time, but when it comes to Apple products, iphones age in dog years. I noticed it’s unresponsiveness to touch, the way it felt like a burning coal in my hand when I used it, Siri’s refusal to cooperate. Then, it deleted all my text messages. It was a warning sign, but I thought I had time.
On Monday, my phone decided it didn’t want to open up imperative apps like Twitter, Facebook, and What’s app. It didn’t want to open up my contacts. The next day, the unthinkable happened: the white screen of death. I rushed out of my writing session at the library to the emergency room at Sprint. The hard drive crashed and could not be saved. RIP phone.
That’s when the real nightmare began. Because for some reason, my phone wasn’t saving to the icloud. I lost almost everything. ALMOST, since I luckily had done a hard backup of my phone before I left for South Africa last November. But that means I’ve lost everything from November until now, including all my ALLEGEDLY launch week photos. So it’s funny that us Debs are talking about technology this week as when technology fails us it can be devastating and teach some hard life lessons. This week I’ve learned to be more responsible about saving things that are precious to me, like photos from a day I waited my entire life.
Here are some valuable apps ALL writers should have:
Google Photos: It backs up all your photos. Google is your friend. Google will never let you down. When the world explodes, Google will still be here.
Evernote: To quantify how much I write in my phone, I started book #3 this week by cutting and pasting all my phone notes into a Word document and I already have fifty-one pages. I typically use the iphone’s notepad, as it syncs with my macbook. But I also back up notes to Evernote, an app I can access from any computer.
Google Drive: An app that you can access all your saved files wherever you are. (I’ll say it again, google is your friend)
Grammarly: An app that double checks your use of your, you’re vs. your when you’re too exhausted to use proper grammar. Works on computers too.
I now have an iphone 7 in rose gold, which I plan to cherish just as much as my gold iphone 6.
