Hindsight is 20/20

The lesson that I learned this weekend: routinely backup your iPhone.

Saturday morning as I was prepping breakfast I heard someone speaking French, then Chinese, Spanish and I think Portuguese.  As the only other person in the room was my daughter who is 2, and speaks only English (or her version of it) I knew that she'd found either my laptop or my iPhone.  I really hoped that it was the laptop...Murphy’s law dictated that it was indeed the iPhone.

I watched as she pushed various buttons and switched between languages and in what felt like slow motion retrieved my phone and realized it was in set-up mode.  As in it had been erased.  As in oh...shit.  Furiously I attempted to get to the next step and realized I couldn’t understand what was displayed…because oh that’s right the default language was now French.  Awesome.

Sadly I wish I could say that I had backed it up recently, but that was not the case as the iTunes backup I used was several months old.  I know there's iCloud, but I think I'm getting really old because that just doesn't make sense to me.

I plugged it into iTunes and let it do its thing, while the kiddo and I went on with our day.  Several hours later I checked on it and it was once again set-up...minus a few apps that I hadn't synced...sigh.

The only problem with having my phone essentially out of commission for most of the day is that I never received my local weather/traffic alerts.  It was by mere coincidence that while I was fiddling with it on my computer trying to find those missing apps, that I had twitter up and saw a bunch of local weather folks tweeting about a severe thunderstorm oh...and A TORNADO.  WTF?!

I grabbed the phone, the 2 cats and the kid and turned on the TV to get more information.  Right as I did that the EAS system kicked in and my screen went black with the texts saying that my county was under a tornado WARNING: meaning that we needed to take shelter...now.  I'm not sure who was more disgruntled the cats or my kid as I literally hauled all three and myself into our safe zone, right as the storm hit.

Thank goodness the tornado never came close to our house.  But the roar of the wind and rain certainly was disconcerting.  The electricity flickered on and off, but thankfully did not go out.

Afterwards...all I could think about was how glad I was that we were safe...oh and that I really need to back up the iPhone daily.