Lost Your iPhone? Restore data with iCloud!

It was probably a crazy night and you don’t remember how your iPhone went missing at the club. It may have been jacked on the street by a thief. You may have genuinely forgotten it on a bus or taxi whose driver you don’t remember. Being in Zambia, you doubt the police will be of much help. Most importantly, you’re worried about your data, especially the really private stuff on your phone.

Well, you can delete all your data  and restore it remotely to another iPhone (or the same one if you recover it) in very easy steps. We’re hoping you had an iCloud account and had signed up for Find my iPhone before your phone went missing. If not, then do it now!

First off, always set a passcode on your phone. That way, any thief trying to access it can not. If your phone is already lost or stolen and you had not set a passcode, you can do it remotely over the internet via Find my Iphone.  The passcode is 4 digits so make sure they are as unpredictable a possible. Avoid numbers like 1234, 4321 or your birthday (the thief might be someone who knows you). iOS 4 and higher versions allow you to change from that simple 4 digit passcode to something longer so always make sure it’s a code only you would know.

After you set up a passcode, you have an option where the phone automatically deletes your data after 10 incorrect entries of the passcode. That way, no thief can access your most personal data. It’s a good thing is you can restore all this deleted information on your iCloud account by signing in with your details and checking your options.

It’s important to set up ‘Find My iPhone’ on your iPhone all the time. With this feature you can locate your phone using GPS and you can delete your data over the internet. You can even have your iPhone display a message telling the person with it where they can return it. However we think this last feature may have security issues because you give the thief an exact location of where you are and they can come to you looking for more things to steal. We’d stick to the data deleting feature.

Your iPhone can be set to back up information all the time new data is added to your phone so that makes it easy to restore data as recent as the day your phone went missing.

As a final precaution, log out of any apps you may have been logged into to avoid the unfortunate chance of the thief accessing private accounts like banking  or email accounts.  Changing your password is the safest way to block access so change them immediately your phone is stolen or goes missing.

You can set up this same feature on your iPad or iMac too even iPod Touch. If you have a BlackBerry, a similar option is installing BlackBerry Protect and if you have a Google Android phone you can install AndroidLost.

Now you have a smart way to make sure your data remains YOUR DATA.

Picture credits: Cult of Mac and iPhone Manager