If someone steals my iPhone and deletes all pictures, that will sync to my Mac. So then all my photos are lost! How do I safeguard against this?
MacBook Pro with Retina display, OS X Yosemite (10.10.3)
If your phone (plus syncing) is the only place you keep your pictures you are asking for trouble, theft or not. Back up onto an external hard disk which is only mounted when you need it, then nothing external can erase them. Then make use of Apple's facilities for protecting your phone:
If your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch is lost or stolen - Apple Support
If your phone (plus syncing) is the only place you keep your pictures you are asking for trouble, theft or not. Back up onto an external hard disk which is only mounted when you need it, then nothing external can erase them. Then make use of Apple's facilities for protecting your phone:
If your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch is lost or stolen - Apple Support
Thank you for your reply. I was hoping to not have to store photos and videos locally any more as I am rapidly running out of storage on my Mac, but like you say that is still the only way to be certain of safeguarding them.
Also - if I were to lose my iPhone - if I then changed my Apple ID password as soon as possible, would that prevent any actions someone took on the stolen phone (e.g. deleting photo library) from syncing to Photos on my Mac and my iCloud Library - presumably it would as the password that is in the iPhone would no longer be valid? Am I understanding it correctly? Thanks again.
Yes, you should change the password in that event. That prevents the phone from accessing any iCloud services.
And you should back up your photos - indeed all your data - on to an external hard disk, not your Mac's internal disk (which might fail at some point). Not backing up will eventually lead to data loss. Time Machine is a good place to start, and it's worth making a clone as well. Backing up is like your house or car insurance - it doesn't seem necessary until it suddenly is.
Thank you for your advice Roger
If someone steals my iPhone and deletes all pictures, that will sync to my Mac. So then all my photos are lost! How do I safeguard against this?j
