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Thread: Have you safely stored a list of your digital contacts?

  1. #11
    Senior Member Simplemind's Avatar
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    My volunteer organization does not allow us to store clients numbers or other volunteers numbers. It is very very rare that we are allowed to give out our own. It often frustrates me because when I'm on call I have to answer any number that comes up because it could be from another member. Pain in the *ss but we can't get hacked either.

  2. #12
    Senior Member jp1's Avatar
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    My phone backs up to iCloud every night when I plug it in.

  3. #13
    Senior Member razz's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by jp1 View Post
    My phone backs up to iCloud every night when I plug it in.
    I am very naive about this as I said, so does the daily back up automatically protect the info, contacts and emails on phone, from hackers? Does the hacker's compromising effort reach into the cloud storage?
    As Cicero said, “Gratitude is not only the greatest of virtues, but the parent of all the others.”

  4. #14
    Senior Member iris lilies's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by jp1 View Post
    My phone backs up to iCloud every night when I plug it in.
    oh right! I forgot about icloud backups.doh.

  5. #15
    Senior Member Teacher Terry's Avatar
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    I am guessing my iPhone does the same.

  6. #16
    Senior Member razz's Avatar
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    My iPhone is set to back up each night as well. Why would it not back up the problem that the hacker inserted as well? My lack of understanding of the possibilities of problems created by hackers is obvious.
    As Cicero said, “Gratitude is not only the greatest of virtues, but the parent of all the others.”

  7. #17
    Senior Member jp1's Avatar
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    The icloud backup is not an identical copy of everything on your phone. It backs up all your data (emails, imessages, photos, contact list) and a list of all your apps but not the apps themselves. If you wipe and restore your phone to factory settings, or purchase a new one, and then log in to icloud from it, the apps will all get reinstalled from the app store and then your data gets repopulated into the phone.

    It sounds like the OP's friend's problem involved a regular computer, not a phone. The same basic solution would also likely work (wipe the harddrive and reinstall everything from scratch and then restore just the data from a backup) but would require that the contents had been backed up prior to the problem. Unfortunately a lot of people still don't routinely back up their personal computers. Depending on what email system they use perhaps the emails still exist on the email provider's system? For example I use gmail. If my computer gets destroyed my email still lives on on gmail's server. What was on the computer is just a copy.

  8. #18
    Senior Member razz's Avatar
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    Did some more research on how secure the info on our phones really is and was surprised - not very. It may be ver.y difficult to know just what and where the hack actually came from if I am understanding what I am reading. Sounds as though turning off one's device if not in use is best


    Some interesting sites to explore.

    https://spyic.com/phone-hack/how-to-hack-a-phone/
    https://www.mcafee.com/blogs/consume...-i-prevent-it/
    Older article:https://www.wired.com/story/imessage...-project-zero/ but it shows the problems with iMessage and the need to keep updating your device ASAP.

    ETA: thanks,jp1, for the additional info. I know that she primarily used her iPad which is linked to her phone and does not own a computer other than those two devices.
    As Cicero said, “Gratitude is not only the greatest of virtues, but the parent of all the others.”

  9. #19
    Simpleton Alan's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by razz View Post
    I know that she primarily used her iPad which is linked to her phone and does not own a computer other than those two devices.
    The two devices aren't actually linked together, but rather they're both linked to her iCloud account and the data stored there.

    It occurs to me that if her contacts and emails were deleted from one of the devices, they should be recoverable by doing a restore from backup, that is if both devices are routinely backed up to iCloud. That's not an absolute fix due to the fact that backups are highly configurable. If her iCloud settings did not include backup of emails and contacts they may be lost forever.

    If it were me, I'd probably reset both devices to their factory defaults then log back into the iCloud account and perform a restore from the latest backup and hope for the best. Although I suppose that if the latest backup was completed after the emails and contacts were deleted from one of the devices, they would no longer be available from the cloud either.
    "Things should be made as simple as possible, but not one bit simpler." ~ Albert Einstein

  10. #20
    Senior Member SteveinMN's Avatar
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    What Alan said.

    I have iCloud backup and perform two local backups of my phone (I don't have a tablet) regularly, to my laptop and to an off-site external drive. Everything has a strong password (including iCloud) and I don't click on links in emails unless I'm absolutely sure of where they came from. Ditto for DW when I can get her to comply.
    Success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has reached in life as by the obstacles which he has overcome. - Booker T. Washington

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