i had the unfortunate loss of losing years and years of sentimental, local / native notes and voice memos in my phone that i wasn’t aware that it wasn’t covered by icloud, due to a lack of communication and care in the verizon employee’s service with me. there are voice memos of my cats voice who’s no longer with us, sounds of my parents laughter, fun annotations, journaling and amazing field notes i’ve gathered in my travels. all this time, i’ve done phone backups myself via phone to phone transfer, which is the safest method to ensure EVERYTHING in your previous phone makes it into your new phone. but the hawthorne blvd location doesnt use this method , because the wifi is bad and it takes too long (this i found out today, yesterday is when i did this upgrade/trade-in) so here i am entrusting this associate to do a “data transfer” for me after all he asks me if my phone is backed up to icloud, even confirming with me that everything in my phone will make it into the new one after i asked if there’s usually anything else i need to make sure to do in my settings. which he assured me will be okay.
if we’re doing a trade-in where there’s no possibility of recovering the old phone, we need to have extra care and overcommunicate to make sure we got everything covered. especially our native information that we may forget to backup because apple doesn’t make it prevalent to do so. i imagine an elderly person would assume the verizon associates expertise (they do this all the time??) and trust that they’ll get everything on there through the cloud - when often we unknowingly are storing information natively in our phone - a common risk of loss with their current method of simply restoring a backup from icloud.
all in all, i think i could’ve blamed myself if i had done the phone onboarding process myself and chose the icloud backup method on my own (but i wouldn’t have, as apple recommends on screen to do the phone to phone transfer) - but had he not rushed and gone through it for me without me needing to decide - or even be asked which method i could go about it? i don’t think any of this would’ve been dealt with. and i’m not sure if that’s fair, and it feels awful to be left with so much loss of memories that meant the world to me when i gave you guys a sale of upgrading my phone…. i wouldn’t want anyone out there to deal with this, so i hope this can serve as a PSA for you to make sure to backup your native “On my iPhone” notes as well as voice notes that live locally… because not even a verizon associate knows about that. i trust verizon less and less after every visit. and im not sure why i gave you guys this chance once again.
