Keep your phone information safe with
Microsoft My Phone

Microsoft My Phone is a free service, currently in beta, that performs a very important function: It helps protect the things you care about on your Windows Mobile smartphone by backing them up to the My Phone web site. If you're like most people, you've probably lost one (or more) mobile phones during your life. It was pretty hard to lose one of those brick-sized phones from the early '90s, but as mobile phones have gotten smaller and more prevalent, the rates of loss have skyrocketed. Because we rely on our phones so heavily and load them up with things that are important to us, the loss is felt even more keenly. I've heard it said that some people would rather lose their wallet than their phone. Using My Phone can help protect you from that dreaded feeling of loss, and since the service is free, there's no excuse not to protect yourself from losing the information on your phone.

You can choose what gets synchronized in the My Phone software Options screen on your phone. If you happen to be using a Microsoft Exchange account, you'll see that contacts, calendar, and tasks are grayed out on the phone. Those items are already backed up on your Exchange server, so there's no need to back them up with My Phone.

My Phone can also keep larger files on your storage card in sync, including photos, videos, music, and documents. It's an “all-or-nothing” approach—you can’t pick and choose what file types to sync. Be careful when you opt to sync these bigger files. You only have 200 megabytes (MB) of storage space to use with the service, which means that if you have even a few music albums on your storage card, you might use up that 200 MB on your first sync. Hopefully, future versions of My Phone will offer granularity, allowing you to back up photos and videos from the storage card, but skip the music.

It's worth noting that My Phone uses your phone’s Internet access to sync your data. You definitely want to have a flat-rate data plan for your smartphone if you use this service, because you don't want to sync your phone and then get an expensive bill at the end of the month.

One of the other great features that My Phone offers is the ability to archive files to the web. This means that you can select an image on your phone using the My Phone web site, select Archive to Web, and then, the next time your phone automatically syncs, that image will be removed from your phone—but kept safe and sound on the web. You can use this feature to free up storage space on your phone or just to remove images that you'd like to keep—but not on your phone. At any time, you can restore the photos back to your phone.

A related feature is the Deleted Items folder on the My Phone web site. When you delete any file, it gets moved to the Deleted Items folder on the site. A single click allows you to restore the image back to your My Phone profile and then back down to your phone the next time the My Phone software synchronizes.

If you actually do lose your phone, or if it gets damaged and you lose everything on it, you'll be glad you used My Phone. All you need to do to get back up and running is get a new Windows Mobile phone, install the My Phone software client on the phone, enter your Microsoft Passport information, and your phone will pull down everything from the most recent backup. Other than any programs you might have installed (My Phone doesn’t back up those), everything should be right where you expect it to be.

Want to get started with My Phone? It's not hard to get it going on your own—just point your desktop browser at http://myphone.microsoft.com, follow the instructions, and relish your new backed up Windows Mobile smartphone experience.