Your mom lost all of the data on her iPhone 11 Max 256GB on June 30, about a week ago. I don’t know the root cause, but she had installed an app from the App Store the day prior that could have been the culprit. Apple doesn’t appear to regulate the apps available in the App Store for countries in SE Asia. Hence, given it’s an iPhone and Apple’s lack of code oversight, I’m not surprised. Maybe it’s evident but I hate iPhones and Macs. The first and last iPhone I ever owned was an iPhone 5.
Her phone was stuck in a boot loop. I tried to resolve the issue by a forced restart and OS update via iTunes. As both methods were unsuccessful, your mom chose to take the phone to a professional. He tried to start the phone but with no luck, and told her that it would need to be reset. She agreed, even though we could have done the reset at home and possibly mined its memory. Your mom needed her phone for work, and giving the task to me could have taken all day. Resetting the phone could have been done immediately but copying its storage would have taken awhile.
Luckily, we didn’t lose everything. I had made a heads-up decision about a year ago to pay for storage on Amazon Photos, loaded the Amazon Photos app on her iPhone and set it to automatically back-up her image files when she’s on a wifi network. Great decision. I strongly considered cancelling that service two or three months after signing-up because those fuckers raised my monthly subscription price by $8 per month from $11.99 to $19.99 but never did it. That must have been determined after Amazon had noticed we were actually using the storage. Regardless, a 70% price increase is crazy. And now that my memory has been refreshed since I thought it was a $2 or $3 increase, I’m strongly considering cancelling Amazon Photos again. Its web interface is terrible compared to competing products.
For the last week, and for the first time ever, I’ve been backing-up the 105GB of image files on Amazon Photos. It’s not a quick process, and our computers quickly run out of free space. 105GB may not seem like a lot especially when you’re old enough to read this entry but it’s material as of July 2020. When you’re 30, stores will probably sell 1 petabye external storage devices on the shelf. Now stores in the US commonly sell 1TB external storage devices even though 5TB models are also available. I struggle to keep 20GB of free space on my laptop’s 256GB hard drive.
I’m not certain when our Amazon Photos account reached capacity but the last uploaded image was from May 30, 2020. We lost many of the pictures and videos your mom had taken since March at least, including memories of pregnancy for you and our trip to Phu Quoc. You know what? I’m done with Amazon Photos. Once I finish backing-up all of the images, I’m going to cancel my subscription and sign-up for Dropbox – $9.99 per month for 2TB.
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