[ Music ] ^M00:00:08 >> Brian Tong: Recently T-Mobile Sidekick owners were left empty handed after a server outage essentially wiped out all their contact, calendar and other personal information and at the time of this shoot none of that data has been retrieved or restored. So it's a perfect time to show you what you can do to make a backup of your smartphones personal data right now. Now don't rely on cell phone companies or online services to have it stored for you on their server. You really need to make a copy for yourself and most of the time you can do this for free. Blackberry users have a free option with their Blackberry desktop manager. Download it from their site it works on both PCs and Macs and it synchs your contacts, calendars and even your music media. You'll also be able to make entire backups with all your settings and then restore them from that file. Window's Mobile users have many options and Microsoft is touting its free My Phone service which is an app for Window's Mobile 6 users that synchs all your crucial information to their servers but if you want a physical backup use PIM backup. It's a free application you'll install on your phone and it allows you to backup all your info and save it as a file on your phones internal or expandable memory. You can then take that file and save it on your desktop and it offers scheduled backups and the ability to restore from them as well. Android users can download the My Backup application from the Android marketplace. There's a free 30-day trial or its 4.99 after that but you'll be able to back up your contact, even your SMS, your MMS messages, settings and more and applications to the SD card or onto their own servers. iPhone users synch to their computer for their media so typically they have a copy of all of their data available or they're using online services like Mobile Me or Google to store that info. Now if you're using email services like GMAIL, Yahoo, Hotmail or even a corporate exchange server you can always export your contacts as a separate file for you to have handy. Now I know there are plenty of other apps and methods to use but the ones I showed you are mostly free and a great starting point to backup your smartphones personal data. [ Background music ] >> Brian Tong: I'm Brian Tong from CNET.com with your how to, use it wisely. [ Music ]
