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[ NNSquad ] It's *your* responsibility to backup your voicemail messages



It's *your* responsibility to backup your voicemail messages
http://j.mp/GN7OsS  (This message on Google+)

 - - -

This story of a man preparing to sue T-Mobile over lost voicemail
messages of his deceased daughter, that he was saving long-term
on T-Mobile's system, hit the AP wire and so is getting wide
publicity.

http://j.mp/GN70UP  (ABC News)

While the situation is undeniably sad, and it could be argued that
T-Mobile should have been more proactive in warning about voicemail
long-term storage risks, not a single story I've seen on this has
pointed out the most obvious "teaching moment" fact of all.

It is *your* responsible to backup voicemail messages that you really
want to save.  I've been doing this since I was a teenager with my
first homemade answering machines.  If someone left me a funny message
I wanted to preserve (yeah, my friends were an odd bunch) I'd copy it
off to a cassette so there was no chance of it being accidentally
erased on the answering machine itself.

Many voicemail systems now allow you to download voicemail to mp3
files.  Absent that, you can buy a cheap tape recorder or digital
recorder -- and a handset intercept or suction cup induction pickup --
for playing the messages and saving them to your local device.  In a
pinch you can even use a microphone against the earpiece, though audio
quality will suffer in that case.  Everything you need is at Radio
Shack.

It is unfortunate that the mainstream media stories about this
case appear to have missed or ignored this important lesson.

--Lauren--
Lauren Weinstein (lauren@vortex.com): http://www.vortex.com/lauren 
Co-Founder: People For Internet Responsibility: http://www.pfir.org 
Founder:
 - Data Wisdom Explorers League: http://www.dwel.org
 - Network Neutrality Squad: http://www.nnsquad.org 
 - Global Coalition for Transparent Internet Performance: http://www.gctip.org
 - PRIVACY Forum: http://www.vortex.com 
Member: ACM Committee on Computers and Public Policy
Lauren's Blog: http://lauren.vortex.com
Google+: http://vortex.com/g+lauren / Twitter: http://vortex.com/t-lauren 
Tel: +1 (818) 225-2800 / Skype: vortex.com
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