Day 1024: Learned a tech thing

[eve_prime]

So, I wanted to back up my phone, or rather, to copy all my photos to my laptop. I've had the phone for more than a year now, and there are lots of photos. I asked J to show me how, and so he got out his charger cable, but my laptop only has full-sized USB ports and the cable only had small USB connectors (it's a small-to-small cable). I looked in my house and found three cables that were small-to-full-sized, but none of them fit into my phone.

J found that when we'd got the phones, they'd given us an adapter, but it was to full-sized "female" and I needed full-sized "male." So that meant if I could find a full-to-full-sized cable (USB-A to USB-A), I could use it with the adapter. So I went to Office Max (arriving within 5 minutes of closing, since it's Sunday), but they didn't have that particular combination. Rite-Aid's electronics section was bare, and Safeway had about what Office Max had. I could order one from Amazon, but it would take five days to get here.

So then I looked online, and the phone just needs USB-C, which is a standard thing, and I wondered what was wrong with all of my old cables. So I looked online some more, and, HA! I had entirely forgotten about "micro USB," and that's what the old ones were and why they didn't work. I had just sort of assumed that micro USB and USB-C were the same thing. But no, USB-C only came out in 2015. So I went back to Safeway and bought a USB-A to USB-C cable. Problem solved. :P

Comments

[claidheamhmor]

Don't you have a cloud service like Google Photos or OneDrive to back up to? You can set those to sync back to computer. (So for me, if I take a pic on my phone, OneDrive syncs it and it appears automagically on my computer).

[eve_prime]

Ooh, that's nice. Makes sense. J and I haven't done that, though D. tells me all of his iPhone photos are on the cloud.

[claidheamhmor]

iPhones do it automatically, and Android users can do it too with Google Photos; you get about 15GB space free, enough for most people. And like Apple, you can cheaply buy more space.

[eve_prime]

I will have to learn how to sync up my laptop. J. had turned off the backup feature on his old phone because he didn't have enough storage space, he says, so he hasn't shown me anything about it.

[kaishin108]

Those techy things!

Good you figured it out :)