This story begins with a cell phone service change for someone close to me that lead to a lot of headache, heartache and just overall a bad experience as a customer.
What happened, well, after numerous not so great experiences with Verizon (retail store personnel, phone support, warranties, and the list goes on), a change of carrier was in the works… When a new carrier was decided on, the switch was made. Everything was great, until… “Wait, where are all of my really old pictures?”
Well, those old pictures were stored on the Verizon Cloud.
What no one mentioned, or knew, was that if you port your number to a new carrier (move your number to a new carrier), Verizon almost immediately disables your account. That means no logging in to the Verizon site, no logging into the cloud, no access to anything that uses your phone number.
So, if you are using the Verizon Cloud to store or back up anything that you need… Make sure you have copies of it BEFORE you change your service, change your phone number, or anything that involves changing your account.
Because we didn’t know that, we’ve spent quite a bit of time trying to get access to old information… years of pictures and memories that are just, at this point, gone.
With all of the calling and requesting and begging and yelling, no one has been able to do anything to actually get the information back… Higher level support pretty much said, “once you port the number to a different carrier, the data is wiped out.” I don’t believe that, but it sounds like no one that the consumer has access to has the tools to access the information.
Bottom line, as a consumer, you are probably the only one that cares about your data. This is a hard lesson, it takes a bunch of extra time, and is always a pain. But in the end, multiple copies of your data backed up to multiple locations is a must in the information age. Companies play fast and loose trying to save money and don’t really care about you, the customer, when push comes to shove. So make sure you protect and backup your data.
If you have any experiences with these types of services, we’d love to hear your thoughts.