Device Failure

Yesterday I spent about eight unscheduled hours recovering from an iPhone crash and didn't get to bed until almost midnight as a result. (That's about 2 1/2 hours late for me.)

I don't know exactly what happened. I added a todo list item and the screen froze. I forced the machine to power down and it would not come back up.

I sort of saw it coming. In March, it stopped syncing with iTunes and said I needed to do a complete restore. "No way!" said I, "I'll wait for it to really fail."

Knowing is, indeed, half the battle, as they say. I stopped using the built-in apps for any real work, opting instead for third-party apps that sync separately from iTunes.

As a result I didn't lose the important stuff:
- Daylite, the CRM system that holds all contact info, customer and vendor relationship history and future commitments, all projects/opportunities and all their appointments, todo items, and notes.
- Bento, the database that holds my gift certificate history, 2 years of notes around founding a new monastery, all my recipes, and my gas mileage records.
- FMTouch, the hand-rolled Filemaker database that holds all of my production history and timecards.

Here's the sum total of what I lost by restoring a 3 month old backup:

- Contact info for one alarm company
- Two days of production timesheets
- Several unfinished blog posts
- A few dozen random photographs
- A daily alarm so I wake up on time. (Sorry, Stella!)
- The ability to trust my first generation iPhone to perform in a time-sensitive sales environment

With that said, I was pleased to find out that I can buy an iPod Touch at the grocery store in town. As soon as the credit card transactions from last weekend are deposited to my bank, I'm taking advantage of the NET60 terms with my yarn dealer and replacing my iPhone with an iPod Touch. I turned off my phone service years ago anyway.

I just can't take a chance that this sort of failure could happen on the morning of a sales event and prevent me from accepting credit cards that day. I'll keep the old iPhone as a backup but switch my daily trust to the new iPod Touch.