iPhone to Android - phone recommendations?

[Susquatch]

The four in our family share 200 GB of cloud storage so there is never a space problem.

Holy Crap! You think 200Gb is enough for 4 people! That's just 50Gb each......

My wife regularly runs out with 1 TeraB (1,000 Gb) on OneDrive. That's almost all her own family photos, videos, and a few files. In her mind, it's all priceless stuff.

That's just cloud storage. On top of that I have 24Tb of file server space here on the home network that includes wedding photos, kids sports videos, my own photos and files, computer backups, and a few odds and sods for the kids. It's about 40% full. Life on 50Gb would be VERY VERY different for me.

 

[KeeponDragon]

Yes, it helps to keep the battery between 20 - 80 percent and keep it ideally at 50%. Even better... don't use your phone

You guys do know you can exchange the battery in your phones, right? It is not super trivial but not a big deal. Usually does not pay as your 3 year old phone is not worth to keep and spend 30-40 on a new battery.

You could be nice to your wife and as a present get her a new battery!

Tom...if only it were that simple...
Battery life isn't much of an issue to me...I don't text as much as I once did or watch enough video or edit enough video to warrant concern..
While I appreciate the candor in your suggestion of a new battery...it's where said "present" will end up should I take you up on that....

No, what broke me with Iphones...is the utter lack of f#cks given to users who lose files/photos/passwords etc when an app is no longer supported by the developer...
My last iphone took an update...but one of my apps was out of date (I didn't realize this)...and with the ios update, away went a vault app that had a lot of stuff I wanted kept private. I couldn't open it, it wouldn't update as the developer shut down.
And apple doesn't allow you to go back in time with phones to recover such things.
Essentially, I wrote off the loss and moved forward. I'm not tech savvy enough to try and root a phone to delve for the lost info.
And I wasn't about to pay to access something that was already mine to begin with, as I found a website that offers such a service. You send them your last backup...they can pull the information out of it...At the time, it was well over 100 bucks.
Sorry. No.

 

[KeeponDragon]

The sad part is, if Apple cared enough to educate their customers on data maintenance, the users wouldn't end up with multiple copies of their files in the cloud, or having their storage max out after a month...
Hell...even Android/Google are downright shifty...
I go into Google's photo's app in Chrome weekly...and clean out the photo's I deleted from my phone...for whatever reason...maybe it's a setting I have not yet found...but if I delete a photo in the phone...it's still there in Google Photos.
If I delete it...it's cause I do not want it anymore...I don't want it backed up for prosperity...it no longer serves my purposes Google...

 

[PeterT]

our family share 200 GB of cloud storage so there is never a space problem. We can each use Apple Music and Apple TV+ from any device. It is $26 per month

Hopefully there are other perks in the plan because on a storage basis, that is pricey. 1 year of fees = 26 * 12 / 200 GB = 0.72 $/GB

vs any random portable external HD example: 162 $ / (5 TB * 1000 GB/TB) = 0.034 $/GB. The cloud option is 22X more expensive than the HD & you need to keep paying. Now theoretically cloud storage, especially Apple, should never die or lose your stuff or whatever. But its always wise to have a few independent storage sites. Even Microsoft 365 account gives you 1 TB for free (more PC orientated but cloud for cloud).

 

[Susquatch]

162 $ / (5 TB * 1000 GB/TB) = 0.034 $/GB.

I just recently bought that exact SSD Hard drive. I could not resist that price for a whopping big 5Tb.

But (there is always a but) the thing is brutally slow on a 3.0 USB port. Even 3.2 is slow maxing out at just over 100mb/sec on large file transfers. And no it's not a source bottle neck cuz that flies on other destinations.

From what I have read, the REALLY BIG BUT is that it's an SSD. Benchmarks only quote their memory life at an average of 3 yrs and then the data becomes unstable. So they can't really be trusted for use for backups. That might not apply to devices that are regularly used. Too much to filter out of all the noise.

 

[trlvn]

Hopefully there are other perks in the plan because on a storage basis, that is pricey. 1 year of fees = 26 * 12 / 200 GB = 0.72 $/GB

To my way of thinking, the backup is free as I would have had the subscription to Apple Music and Apple TV+ anyway. (TV+ has a decent stream of interesting new series, eg Slow Horses.) This way, all four of us have those services for basically nothing extra.

Craig
(We don't back up our computers to the cloud. We each have a dedicated hard drive for that.)

 

[PeterT]

@Susquatch Good catch. I screen grabbed the wrong one. SSD should not be used for long term storage & if you inadvertently delete files, they don't recover like mag drives. Meant to screen grab something like this. There are better systems, I'm just poking around the portable styles.

 

[trevj]

That's what I do. I leave Contacts & Notes & lightweight stuff as automatically synch/backup to iCloud. But for photos every so often at 'backup time' when I'm on the PC/WiFi I temporarily turn on synch for photos, download them from iCloud to my PC, basically remove anything from phone I no longer want present & turn off auto-synch for Photos again. But some people want their entire photo library on their phone & so need synch/backup enabled. So that's the rub as I understand it, lots of content potentially means running low on space, so Apple is there to sell you some more via subscription add (as do all the other cloud services).

Yeah, I have a short charge cable that essentially lives on my desktop PC, every few weeks, I will create a new folder, and copy all my pictures across to there. Nothing earth shattering if I lose a few weeks of pictures, as most of them are either pictures of part numbers, birds I encountered that I wanted to look up the ID of, and similar pretty average reminders of what I was doing at the time...

Some of my family have their whole lives on their phones, banking, emails, credit card info, etc. Me, I kinda resent that my phone knows my name...

 

[PeterT]

To my way of thinking, the backup is free as I would have had the subscription to Apple Music and Apple TV+ anyway.

That's kind of what I thought. Kind of analogous to MS-365. I need Excel, Word.. the office package. If they want to through in a TB of storage that's cool. (Although I detest the constant backup nagging).