The Mossberg Solution » synchronization

Lost Cellphone? Your Carrier Has Your Backup

Katherine Boehret — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 04:22:02 +0000

By the time you’ve left your cellphone in a taxi or dropped it into a pot of soup, it’s too late. All those phone numbers you had at your finger tips — your best friend, your boss, your mom — are gone. (Well, maybe you’ll remember Mom’s.)

Some companies have tried to soothe backup concerns with gadgets like the $50 Backup-Pal from Advanced Wireless Solutions LLC, or wireless services like Skydeck. But for many for people, it’s just as easy to ignore the risk.

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Cellphone carriers caught on to this problem, and all of them now offer solutions that make it a cinch for you to automatically back up your cellphone contacts. It doesn’t hurt these companies to know that if your contacts are saved with one of them, you might be deterred from switching to another. Indeed, whenever a customer replaces his or her cellphone with one from the same carrier, a backed-up address book can be wirelessly loaded onto it in minutes.

But the details on how each carrier handles or transfers contacts can be a little dicey. This week I spoke to Verizon Wireless (VZ), T-Mobile, AT&T (T) and Sprint (S) to get the lowdown on how these cellphone backup services work. Is a phone’s address book backed up free of charge, or do users pay a monthly fee? Can people access and edit their stored contacts, and can they transfer these contacts to new cellphones or different carriers, entirely? Will carriers charge users to move contacts to a new phone? How often is the cellphone’s address book synchronized, and can someone specifically set what time this occurs? The responses yielded some interesting information that customers may not know.

Each carrier has a different name for its service, though they all do roughly the same thing: wirelessly tap into the phone’s address book on a regularly set schedule to back up its contents. This backed-up data can be accessed online via each carrier’s Web site, and there, content can be typed in at a PC and pushed to the phone, a much easier option than using numeric keypads to enter names.

Verizon uses Backup Assistant, a free service as long as users are registered online at My Verizon (MyVerizon.com); otherwise it costs $1.99 a month. T-Mobile’s service (my.t-mobile.com) is also free, and works on the majority of phones currently sold by the company, but not all older models. Its service was originally called T-Mobile Address Book, but is now called Mobile Backup, the same name used by AT&T for its service (mobilebackup.att.com).

AT&T charges customers $2 a month for backup. Sprint’s backup offering (sprint.com/services) is a bit more confusing in that it has three types of service depending on your phone type: Wireless Backup is the name of its $2 monthly service that applies to a majority of the carrier’s phones; for six of its newest phones, Sprint Mobile Sync, a free service, will work; for Nextel phones, MyNextel Address Book is available, and it costs $5 a month.

Wireless synchronization occurs according to a set schedule that users can determine. Verizon backs up data daily and lets people choose between the morning, afternoon, evening or late night. AT&T lets its customers set Mobile Backup to work daily or once a week, and they can set the specific syncing time down to the minute. T-Mobile’s Mobile Backup and Sprint’s three backup services work automatically: Every time a phone’s address book changes, a sync is initiated.

These syncs occur unobtrusively, and don’t require any action on the part of the user after the initial setup, nor do syncs incur any extra fees like text-messaging charges.

However, if you’re planning to switch from one carrier to another and you’d like to take your contacts with you, these carriers — unsurprisingly — don’t make it easy. Verizon suggests printing out contacts prior to disconnecting your line with them. T-Mobile says its service is exclusive to its users and doesn’t give people a way to export their data. Sprint allows users of Sprint Mobile Sync and MyNextel Address Book to export their contacts into a common type of format called a .CSV data file, which allows the data to be imported into an application like Microsoft Outlook. AT&T doesn’t currently allow exporting of contacts, but says it will enable exports to .CSV sometime this summer.

All carriers will help you synchronize your old phone’s saved address book onto a new phone — as long as you’re buying the new phone from them and your old phone was from the same carrier. Verizon will help you with this free if you use Backup Assistant; if not, they’ll charge $10 to move your contacts over from an old phone. T-Mobile and AT&T say they will move a customer’s contacts from one phone to another for free, even using older phones that weren’t originally synced to Mobile Backup. Sprint says it supports migration between phones using Wireless Backup and Sprint Mobile Sync at no additional cost.

So instead of keeping your fingers crossed that you never lose your cellphone and all the numbers stored on it, talk to your carrier about what it offers in the way of backup services. You might be pleasantly surprised to learn about a free or low-cost service that works automatically and will pay you back in spades should you need to replace your cellphone. But, if you want to make your data portable across carriers, you may be out of luck.

Edited By Walter S. Mossberg

Email us at mossbergsolution@wsj.com. Find this and other columns and videos online free at the All Things Digital Web site: http://walt.allthingsd.com

Sending Large Files Down the Tubes

Katherine Boehret — Wed, 03 Oct 2007 00:01:00 +0000

Too many times, I’ve shared a large batch of digital files with friends or family members only to realize that I included an unwanted photo or shared with someone accidentally. But once these documents are sent, they’re out of my control and on a server somewhere being distributed via email or through a photo-sharing service. Making certain files private or changing who has access to those files is a complicated, time-consuming process.

Tubes installs a program on the desktop (right) into which files can be dragged and shared using automatic synchronization.

This week, I tested another product in the long line of programs that uses automatic synchronization to simplify the process of sharing large files by giving you the ability to change files and privacy options at any time. It’s called Tubes (www.tubesnow.com) from Tubes Networks and it takes its name from the pneumatic vacuum-tube system commonly used in bank drive-throughs that motivated me to join my Mom on visits to the bank as a kid. Mom would pull up and a container would whoosh over through a tube to arrive beside the car window; after a quick exchange it returned with her deposit slip and a lollipop for me.

Tubes aims to work with the same sort of magic. Once installed, its desktop application stays opened on your computer as a place where “tubes” are made for sending files. Any type of file can be dragged, dropped and sent off to share with other people using these virtual tubes. As soon as you release data into a tube, a whoosh sounds (like that of the vacuum tube) and your files are encrypted and uploaded to the Tubes server.

Invited guests view your tube’s data in its full, uncompressed format. The owner of the tube always has the final say on what is shared with whom, and changes made to tubes on your hard drive are detected instantly via automatic synchronization, guaranteeing viewers will always see the latest version of the tube. Shared tubes are also accessible via the Web, saving viewers from downloading the Tubes desktop program.

Other products like Sharpcast (www.sharpcast.com) and Pando (www.pando.com) also offer ways to share large digital files; Sharpcast uses synchronization similar to that of Tubes — it all happens behind the scenes without any work on the user’s part.

Tubes is available in a free version that provides a gigabyte of storage, or in paid versions with five, 10 and 20 gigabytes of storage for $6, $11 or $21, respectively.

Most of the time, Tubes worked well for me when I installed it on two Windows machines, one running XP and one running Vista. Tubes’ smart use of an already familiar process — dragging and dropping — gives you the impression that you already know how to use it and makes sharing files seem easy. I started dragging all sorts of files into tubes that I created, naming them and labeling them with a representative icon (one of 10 offered by Tubes or one of my own images).

For all its usefulness, Tubes certainly has room for improvement. For now, there isn’t a Mac version of the program, and when friends and I tried accessing shared tubes using a Mac Web browser, the results were inconsistent and sometimes didn’t work at all. Windows Vista had its own issues. After installing Tubes on my Vista laptop, an error message labeled “invalid argument” made me feel like a member of the debate team. And I couldn’t see thumbnail images of photos in my tubes using Vista, though I could on Windows XP.

Today, Tubes is releasing an updated version of its program that aims to improve the usability and look of the product, including refining the processes of sharing tubes and looking at tubes via the Web.

Before sharing tubes, I adjusted the permissions granted to each guest by labeling them as a Reader, Author or Editor; only the Owner can invite others to view a tube. But these labels can get confusing. More than once, I granted guests the highest level of permission, which is Editor, allowing them to make changes to the files in my tube, only for the guest to be asked for his registered Tubes email and password, which an invited guest shouldn’t need.

The Tubes experience was best when the recipient of my Tubes invitations had the application installed on his or her desktop.

After installing Tubes on a computer at work, I installed it on my home PC and easily auto-synched tubes that I created at work onto my home PC — a big plus.

Tubes incorporates the Web by assigning a unique URL to every file in every tube, and every tube automatically generates its own Web site, or “tubeSite,” as it’s called. Individual URLs for each file can be found by right clicking on a file and selecting an option to copy the URL into an email or browser. I copied the URL of a shared MP3 audio file and pasted it into my browser; it played a Fountains of Wayne song with no problem. But sharing these URLs with others is only possible if the owner gives permission.

Comments about tubes can be made in the “tubeBlog” — accessible through any tube in the application or online. I created a tubeBlog for a tube with photos from one of my vacations, adding descriptions and comments to specific photos. Others, with my permission, could do the same, using the photos from the tube or just leaving comments.

A friend used Tubes to share photos with me while vacationing in Italy and Amsterdam. I added my own travel photos and an itinerary made in Microsoft Word to his tube and changed the tube’s title; these alterations synched instantly.

Even if you aren’t online, you can access tubes or make changes to them by dragging files in or taking them out; updates are made automatically the next time your computer connects to the Web.

Tubes is off to a good start, but it needs to improve its system to make permission levels more understandable for tube owners and those invited to see a shared tube. With a few improvements, Tubes could be a product that I’ll continue using on Windows computers long after this column.

Email mossbergsolution@wsj.com

Write to Katherine Boehret at katie.boehret@wsj.com