This iPhone recovered from a river is your daily reminder to back your stuff up

Lost iPhone Found In River
Lost iPhone Found In River (Image credit: iMore)

What you need to know

  • Someone dropped their iPhone into the Sacramento River.
  • The phone was full of photos that weren't backed up.
  • Luckily someone was able to dive and retrieve it.

There's a reason that Apple builds iCloud Photos into iPhones, iPads, and Macs and contrary popular belief, it isn't just to make money. It's to make sure that you don't end up diving into cold, murky water looking for an iPhone that has the only copies of your important photos. Thankfully, they at least put the whole thing on YouTube for us to watch.

The story goes that someone was trying to help another man when his iPhone fell into the Sacramento River. That iPhone was full of photos that the man needed to retrieve, so he enlisted the help of YouTuber Merman Mike.

Despite the water being super cold – and full of E. Coli – and visibility being almost zero, Merman Mike was able to locate the iPhone using a trusty metal detector.

You can watch the whole thing on YouTube, not that you can see a great deal underwater!

Unfortunately, it isn't mentioned either in the video or the YouTube comments whether the man was able to power the iPhone back on after it was found. While Merman Mike was looking for the iPhone we heard what sounded like a phone vibrating, so it's possible it was working while underwater. Mike, if you're reading this, we'd love to know what happened when the cameras stopped rolling!

For everyone else, get your data backed up. It's super simple to do!

Oliver Haslam
Contributor

Oliver Haslam has written about Apple and the wider technology business for more than a decade with bylines on How-To Geek, PC Mag, iDownloadBlog, and many more. He has also been published in print for Macworld, including cover stories. At iMore, Oliver is involved in daily news coverage and, not being short of opinions, has been known to 'explain' those thoughts in more detail, too.

Having grown up using PCs and spending far too much money on graphics card and flashy RAM, Oliver switched to the Mac with a G5 iMac and hasn't looked back. Since then he's seen the growth of the smartphone world, backed by iPhone, and new product categories come and go. Current expertise includes iOS, macOS, streaming services, and pretty much anything that has a battery or plugs into a wall. Oliver also covers mobile gaming for iMore, with Apple Arcade a particular focus. He's been gaming since the Atari 2600 days and still struggles to comprehend the fact he can play console quality titles on his pocket computer.