What if you lost your social network?

Not long ago I posted theĀ Do you back up your most important stuff? post, so are you doing it yet?

I thought I would do the figures on social networks this time – not your Facebook or Twitter profile, but the list of phone numbers and email addresses you have stored on your phone. Most people are lost without their mobiles – but it isn’t really the phone that matters, it is the list of friends in the contact list.

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Imagine if you lost your phone. How long would it take you to reproduce the list? I have around 250 contacts, and if it took me a conservative 5 minutes to get their number from the white pages or facebook or by emailing them, that would mean 20 hours or 2.5 days working full time!

Spending days rebuilding my contact list doesn’t sound like fun – so I make sure that my iPhone backs up in iTunes at least every week so that I always have a few copies. Is yours safe?

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I'm Ross Hill (profile / contact), I apply minimalism to live an emergent life.

I am the founder of Coverhunt and co-founder of The Hive, amongst other things.

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