GLOBAL – There’s all sorts of ways we can back up and save our data in the event of something bad happening to our devices (specially losing them, or having them stolen). Following a survey from the folks over at BetaLabs, we figured it’d be a good subject for a poll on Conversations and you weren’t backward in coming forward with your thoughts. 30 per cent of you said you’d find contacts hardest to replace, with images and media coming a close second with 25 per cent.

Given the myriad ways to keep contacts safe, I was a little surprised about that one. Images and media I can understand as I’m not always great at taking the stuff from my phone and moving it to an online service (such as Ovi Share) or my desktop. Applications was another one, coming in third with 16 per cent of the vote, but with some changes coming in the Ovi Store, that one will soon be more straightforward to resolve.

Calendar entries, like contacts, are easy to keep updated using something like Ovi, but that didn’t stop it taking 11 per cent of the vote. Device and application settings, along with bookmarks all accounted for a small part of the vote, though the ‘other’ category threw up some interesting topics including: messages, FM transmitter and the call log.

Commenting on the poll, reader Hary makes a good point about backing up and restoring applications:

“I don’t think so far, there is any way developed by Nokia or anyone else to back up applications from phone memory. So if you lose them you have to download one by one separately”

That’d be like creating a disk image of your device, where the core installation, including settings, applications and what not, is backed up and could be easily restored in one go, an interesting concept that’d surely resonate in a lot of circumstances.

The other point is of course data security, as ready Rick Low explains in his comment:

“A good backup strategy does nothing to address confidentiality. If a mobile phone is lost or stolen, there is a window of opportunity for data theft before the loss is realized”

It seems the folks over at Betalabs are cooking something up in relation to all this, though we’ll have to wait and see what it’s all about. The survey is still open so if you want to have some input on what’s important to you when it comes to data security and restoration, head on over and take part.