How to Prevent a Lost Phone From Ruining Your Life (2024)

Though LAX took about three weeks to finally track down my phone, I knew it was lost somewhere in Terminal 7 and not en route to the middle of nowhere. And that was thanks to Apple’s Find My app. I had enabled Find My so that I could always share my location with my sister (we use it to make sure the other is safe while out jogging), but it also allowed her to see my lost phone’s whereabouts.

All iPhones come with the Find My app installed, which enables you to track your phone from any of your other linked Apple devices (MacBook, iPad, and so on). To turn it on, simply go to Settings, tap Find My, and enable the function. If you don’t have other Apple devices or don’t have an internet connection, trusted contacts in your Family Sharing group can also use Find My to track down your phone, or you can enable them to generate an Apple ID access code. They’ll probably make fun of you after helping you out, but that’s a separate story.

Backing up your phone is time-consuming. It’s boring. It costs money, since you have to pay a company like Apple or Google monthly charges for space in the cloud. But I challenge you to consider what you care most about on your phone, and whether those things are worth the time and money to hold on to them. I didn’t back up my misplaced iPhone, and this is what I nearly lost: audio recordings of my late grandfather, photos spanning the entirety of my current romantic relationship, and a video testimony from my sister promising, on the record, that I can wear whatever color dress I want to her wedding. She’s already looking at venues. I could have been doomed.

Compared with the challenge of finding a bridesmaid gown that I’ll actually wear again—for, no, I shan’t “just hem it to make a co*cktail dress”—backing up over the cloud is easy. Simply go to your phone’s settings, select your name, tap iCloud Backup, and then select Back Up Now. It costs only about $3 a month to back up 200GB of priceless memories. I pay for it now.

If you have doubts about the long-term safety of files that you store in the cloud, or if you prefer something tangible, I urge you to invest in an external hard drive and manually transfer your files there instead. This process is a bit convoluted, since you can’t directly transfer from a phone to a hard drive; you have to move your files to your laptop first and then transfer them from the laptop to the drive. It’s time-consuming, but at least it isn’t thought-consuming. Find a TV show to accompany you (any will do, though the Sex and the City episode where Carrie’s laptop breaks down without her backing up any files seems especially relevant) and get to work.

If you use a two-factor authentication app (and you should), you can back that up, too. As much as I love chatting with the folks at The New York Times Security team, I’m sure they’d have preferred I’d done this rather than calling them in a panic unable to access my email. Duo Mobile, the 2FA app we recommend, offers a backup and syncing option that keeps you from being locked out if you lose your phone—just make sure to enable it.

This one should be self-explanatory: Don’t keep all your passwords stored on one note in your Notes app and definitely don’t name that note “Passwords.” (Confession: I did.) In my defense, I long ago tried to install 1Password, Wirecutter’s recommended password manager, but I got sidetracked by something and didn’t finish. You should absolutely invest in a password manager, but even if you don’t, I urge you to do as I say, not as I did. Not only does saving all your passwords on your device in the most easy-to-find note imaginable put you at risk for thieves to access all your accounts, but it also means that when it comes time to access those accounts yourself, you do not have the passwords to access them.

That brings me to my next point, about the importance of memorization. And listen, I have lots of stuff memorized: Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken,” all the elements of the periodic table, every lyric to every Neko Case song. But the list of what I don’t have memorized is still greater, and it unfortunately includes such important information as my boyfriend’s birthday, my Social Security number, my personal-email password, my work-email password, and my Apple ID password.

When I lost my phone and therefore lost access to my little password treasure trove, I unleashed about 300 headaches I couldn’t have predicted. Take my advice and memorize a few key passwords, or at least write them on a piece of paper tucked somewhere safe inside your home. If you use a password manager, you don’t need to memorize all of them, just your Apple ID password and your email password. If you know your Apple ID password, you can remotely enable Lost Mode on your iPhone, which locks the device and disables your stored payment information. And if you don’t have your email password memorized … well, good luck doing anything else. Use a mnemonic device or tattoo the passwords on your skin if you must, but make sure that you can access your accounts.

The great irony of losing a phone is that you basically need a phone to replace it. In some instances, you have to call an Apple Store to make an appointment at a Genius Bar, and then you have to figure out how to navigate to said Apple Store without the help of Google Maps and, worse, without the entertainment of your favorite podcast or daily sibling phone call to accompany you on the ride.

I kept a screenshot of a poem by Elizabeth Bishop on my old iPhone 6, and in the weeks after it went missing, I thought about that poem incessantly. “The art of losing isn’t hard to master,” Bishop wrote, but I’ve learned that what’s even easier is the art of backing up all your information and organizing your life so that the losing part doesn’t sting so bad or perhaps doesn’t happen at all.

Eventually, LAX recovered my missing phone, and I was overwhelmed with relief to be reunited with everything I thought I had lost. I can’t know what the future holds—maybe I’ll lose my phone at some other airport or drop it into Lake Como, or lightning will strike it right out of my hand—but it doesn’t matter. My data is backed up, my passwords are secure, my device is trackable. I am impervious, finally. None of those things will bring disaster.

This article was edited by Caitlin McGarry and Jason Chen.