Shoot, save and store those photos, data

So, you finally got that fancy new smartphone you’ve been dreaming of. All those Friday nights with friends you skipped were worth it. But then you accidentally drop it in the toilet. All the photos that you took and the music files you painstakingly sorted and saved, gone down the drain.

There are many ways to lose data, and the toilet is just one of those areas where data is disgustingly difficult to retrieve. According to Seagate, 880 billion photos will be taken this year, but most of them will be lost because two out of five people will drop their phone down the john. As easily as smart devices enrich lives, the data they store could just as easily get lost.

According to Seagate, 87 per- cent of travellers rely on their smartphones while on vacation. A slim phone these days can replace those chunky DSLRs and videocams, making it easy for tourists to document and immediately share their awesome vacation on social media. An average 16-gigabyte iPhone can take up to three hours of HD video – a considerable amount of content.

The downside is that small gadgets like smartphones are easy to steal. In 2012 alone, New York City reported a 40 percent increase in theft of mobile devices containing an unimaginable amount of personal data.

Will staying home save you from data loss? Not quite, according to Seagate. 72 percent of social networking is done using multiple devices, but 1,840,000 devices fail per year because of hardware breakdown.

To make sure that important data survive the worst, Seagate advices users to get into the habit of backing them up using external hard drives or a secured cloud service. Those who want both features can try Seagate devices, which offer hard and cloud storage in a sturdy and compact product.

Most of Seagate’s devices, such as the Backup Plus Slim or the Backup Plus Fast, provide terabytes of storage space that can be used to save an enormous amount of photos, videos, and documents. But they also come with Dashboard, a software that gives them access to a cloud service that lets them save more data should they happen to max out their hard drive.