I am a member of the Consumer Services committee for the Better Business Bureau. They have a new feature on their website that is very helpful. It is called the Scam Tracker. Every week I get calls about Microsoft or some other tech company reaching out to people to make them think their computer is having problems. Unfortunately, you wouldn’t believe how often these innocent people are victimized because they allow the companies to access their computer and “fix” the so called problems. Microsoft or any other company will not contact you. There are however, many other scams that surface to take advantage of people. You may have heard by now from the news media about an IRS scam in which callers are representing themselves as IRS agents and they end up obtaining secure information on the phone. Check out this BBB website and stay alert.
How much would you hate to lose the thousands of photos on your phone? Apple’s iCloud does back them up in a limited capacity, but you can’t log into iCloud.com and access your photos. Your free space is limited to 5 GB. If you have a Google account, you can easily backup all of your photos to the Google Photos app – which offers you 15 GB of free storage. You can also upload photos from your PC or Mac to their space AND view and manage the pictures online.
Download the app to your phone and sign into your account – your gmail address and password.
You will go through a very short wizard.
When it asks if it should backup over WiFi or cellular, stick with the WiFi so it doesn’t go against your data plan.
The app will also ask if you want “high quality” backups. The high quality option will basically look the same as your originals.
You can go to Google online and once you have signed in, you can choose Google Photos from the menu and see all of your photos.
Microsoft One Drive has a similar app if you have a Microsoft account.