Touring MyPhone – Microsoft’s Online Backup for Smartphones

In February of this year, Microsoft announced the beta for a new product called MyPhone. With MyPhone, Microsoft is looking to provide simple and easy backup of your device to the cloud, where you can safely manage and restore the data to a new device or to your existing device in the off chance that some horrible event has caused you to lose your phone or the data it contains. The private beta has recently been lifted and the service is now available for everyone to test and enjoy.

The MyPhone service will not backup your entire device. It will only consider certain items when backing up. MyPhone provides 200MB of space to backup your Contacts, Calendar, Tasks, Text Messages, Photos, Video’s, Music, and Documents. On a side note, if you are already sync’ing your email, contacts, and calendar with Exchange, MyPhone will not back those up. When it comes to documents, MyPhone won’t just backup anything in your My Documents folder. It looks for specific file types that it will backup.

To get started with MyPhone, head over to MyPhone.Microsoft.com and create an account. Then grab your smartphone and browse to MyPhone.Microsoft.com/Install to download and install the device client. When you first run this client, you will be prompted to accept Microsoft’s legal terms and then sign-in using your Live ID. This will connect your phone with the account you just setup at the MyPhone website. The last thing that you need to do is select if you want to synchronize automatically or manually. The default when you select Automatically is to sync once a day in the middle of the night. This can be changed by selecting Menu / Schedule from the MyPhone app on the device. Here you can pick between Daily and Weekly and change the actual time of day that the backup runs.

When the synchronize starts, it will upload all of your data to the MyPhone website. Just so you are aware, this could take a little while, but it shouldn’t get in your way as the backup will run in the background.

In the off chance that you don’t want certain elements to be backed up, you can select Menu / Options and turn off or on the various elements. By default MyPhone won’t look at the storage card. On this screen, you can turn on backup on the storage card which will then backup the various elements that are stored on the SD card.

From the device side, that’s about all there is to MyPhone. The rest of the magic takes place on the MyPhone website.

On the MyPhone site, you can browse your contacts, documents, text messages, and everything that has been backed up. Down the left side of the screen you can see all the different elements that have been backed up. Selecting any one of them will show the contact in the middle of the screen, and the details of the highlighted item and some available options on the right hand side. Any item can be archived to the web. This will remove the item from your phone, but still keeps it in your account online and if need be, you can always push it back down to the device.

For contacts, calendar items, and tasks, you have the option to edit the item directly through the web. On the next sync, the updated version will be sent to the phone on the next sync. You can even create new contacts or calendar items directly on the web.

The 200MB storage space is a little small, but to be fair, there are not many devices out today that can hold more than 200 MB without the use of a storage card. However, I can see the amount of space available will be causing some problems with some people and it won’t take long before more and more people start hitting the limit.

What really disappoints me about MyPhone is that it doesn’t back up some of the more popular customizations like wallpaper settings, ringtones, carrier network settings, email account settings, favourites, and more. These are all key things that people don’t want to lose any more than their text messages. Backing that information up is just as important. I hope it’s something that Microsoft can add in a future build. Otherwise, this is a great product at an even better price – free.

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