🛑 STOP: iCloud/Google Drive are NOT backups (and the $1,000 lesson)

Hey there, {{first_name | friend}}. It’s Tuesday! My Christmas Cash Giveaway, powered by Incogni, could put some extra spending money in your pocket. Every single day, one lucky reader of this newsletter is randomly selected to win a $100, $200 or $500 Amazon gift card. Are you today’s lucky reader? Check your Golden Ticket toward the bottom to find out!

✈️ This is plane crazy. A fun piece of gaming tech was originally built to help pilots blow stuff up more accurately. Can you guess which everyday gadget started off for folks in a cockpit? Was it the: A) computer mouse, B) joystick, C) laser pointer or D) touch screen? Take your best shot, the answer’s at the end! 

🛑 Don’t let Big Tech bury my emails! Click at least three to five links in this issue to teach the algorithms you actually want to hear from me. Open, click and reply if you can. That’s how you keep this newsletter landing in your inbox and not in spam oblivion. Thanks for supporting what I do, you’re the reason this works! — Kim

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Last week, my big and much, much, MUCH older sister (Hi, Christine, just teasing, you know I love ya!) called me in a panic. She had 738 important files stored on a little USB thumb drive. Lesson plans, documents, photos, everything. The drive died. 

I could hear that sick feeling in her voice. The one you get when tech decides to betray you at the worst possible moment. I pulled out every recovery trick I know. Nothing worked. Not a single byte.

So she took the drive to a local data recovery shop. They said the words nobody wants to hear: “It will be about $1,000, and we can’t guarantee we’ll get anything back.”

A thousand dollars for a maybe. Yikes.

Thumb drives die. External drives die. Hard drives die. Your laptop will die.

Everything you care about, every document and photo that matters, lives on hardware that is eventually going to fail. That’s not pessimistic. That’s reality.

Here’s the part that still surprises people. 

iCloud and Google Drive are not backups. They sync. If you delete something or the file gets corrupted, it’s gone everywhere. You’re not getting it back. 

1. Follow the three-copy rule. One copy on your device, one on an external drive and one off-site or cloud-based. If you only have two copies total, you’re one disaster away from heartbreak.

2. Check your drive’s health. Use CrystalDiskInfo (Windows) or DriveDx (Mac) to see early warning signs like reallocated sectors or failing SMART indicators. FYI, CrystalDiskInfo is free while DriveDx doesn’t cost anything for the first scan. Afterward, it starts at $20 (one-time payment).

3. Do a yearly backup fire drill. Restore one random file. If you can’t restore it, your backup system doesn’t work.

The easiest fix is to get an automatic cloud backup that runs without you thinking about it. Carbonite, a sponsor of my show, checks all the boxes. It quietly backs up your devices and entire computer in the background and lets you restore files with one click. 

No panic. No $1,000 recovery bill. Use my radio show link to save 50% right now. Btw, I get no kickbacks or residuals if you buy. 

Think of it like insurance. You may not appreciate it every day, but when things go wrong, you will be incredibly grateful you have it. You get unlimited, encrypted and automatic backups for only $3.99 a month. That’s money well spent for sure.

He was so paranoid about his search results that he paid thousands to bury negative stories. Then, I talk to Kala (aka TikTok’s Tunnel Girl) about digging 30 feet under her house. Plus: dodgy Amazon Fire Sticks, YouTube’s most-watched video and the new Gemini 3.

Listen on Komando.com →

🎧 Or listen now on your favorite platform:

How real is the threat of the digital Grinch? Real enough that Amazon warned all 300 million of its customers. Scammers are spoofing delivery updates, flashing fake deals, even cold-calling as “tech support.” Shop and track only inside the Amazon app or website, and never, ever click a sketchy link. The real deal isn’t hiding in your spam folder.

Liar, liar, AI analyzer: OK, you know how people say, “You can’t lie to me, I can see it in your face”? There’s an AI app for lawyers that actually tries to do that (paywall link). It scans tone, facial tics and body language. Developers fed it videos of known liars (Clinton, A-Rod, Weiner), and now it flags lies in real time. The tool is already being pitched for use in courtrooms, depositions and Zoom interviews

💻 Bitcoin Hail Mary hits: Imagine scratching a single lottery ticket and winning $270,000. That’s basically what happened in crypto world. One solo guy mined an entire Bitcoin block alone, getting a 3.125 BTC reward. It’s happened only 308 times. He beat out massive server farms that eat power like Vegas in July. The odds here were 1 in 180 million.

Crack for kids: So Meta, TikTok, Snap and YouTube are being sued for knowingly addicting teens. About 6,000 pages of unsealed court docs show Meta calling Instagram “a drug” and themselves “pushers.” Zuckerberg (allegedly) said not to alert parents about teen livestreams, because that might “ruin the product.” TikTok’s internal docs (allegedly) said its U.S. version was more harmful than China’s, and even compared it to opium. All companies deny wrongdoing, of course. Yikes. 

💀 Safety not included: A new whistleblower lawsuit says Figure AI fired its safety engineer after he warned that their humanoid robot could literally fracture a human skull. Like, actual Terminator vibes. He claims the company had no safety protocols, tried to downplay risks to investors and ignored him even after a robot allegedly punched a fridge hard enough to dent steel. I think it’s time for us to start being nicer to our Roombas and ChatGPT. Oh, just because you need a smile after that. C-3PO, Robocop and the Terminator are planning a play about classical music composers. C-3PO says, “I’ll be Mozart.” Robocop says, “I’ll be Beethoven.” The Terminator says, “I’ll be Bach.”

The roads are set to be stuffed this Thanksgiving. Take a listen to this report to get out of a traffic jam.

Listen on Komando.com →

🎧 Or listen now wherever you get your podcasts, search for “Komando.”

⚡️ 3-second tech genius: Need a cheat sheet? Just glance down at this $7 mouse pad that puts all your go-to Excel, Word and PowerPoint commands at your fingertips.

Make Back Tap less sensitive: If you use the iPhone’s Back Tap, you might’ve noticed it goes off a little too easily. You can fix that. Go to Settings > Accessibility > Touch > Back Tap and switch it to Triple Tap instead. You’ll trigger it way less by accident.

Make your Android smoother: A higher rate gives scrolling a more responsive feel. To check, go to Settings > Display > Display refresh rate and change it from 60 Hz to whatever the max is. FYI, if you have an Auto or Adaptive option, turn that on to help save battery.

🎄 Prompt for holiday prep: Christmas is a month away, so let a chatbot help you plan ahead and avoid the last-minute scramble. Try, “I’d like help organizing Christmas. Help me come up with gift ideas and holiday meals. I’d also like a clear checklist and a day-by-day timeline that spreads tasks out, so I finish everything in three weeks.”

Venmo privacy alert: PayPal and Venmo can send money to each other, but that also means PayPal users can look you up by your phone number. That’s how those “oops, wrong person, send it back” scams start. To protect yourself, open Venmo and go to Settings > Privacy > Find Me and restrict who can search for you.

✂️ Stop bleeding money! Do you know how many monthly subscriptions you’re paying for right now? I bet you’re wrong. I use Rocket Money, the brilliant app that instantly tracks down every single recurring bill, even the ones you totally forgot about. The first time I logged in, it saved me a jaw-dropping $435! Stop paying for services you don’t use. Try Rocket Money and grab your cash back now!*

Ever dropped your phone on your face during the evening bed-scroll? Yeah, me, too.

Good news: Apple’s new Hikawa Phone Grip and Stand could keep your iPhone from free-falling onto your orbital bone. 

It’s made for people with limited hand strength and reduced dexterity, but works for anyone who wants a steadier hold or quick prop. 

This modern-sculpture blob, resembling something you’d see in a museum lobby, snaps on with MagSafe like a sticky little useful art project. Yours for $69.95. Chartreuse or Crater are sold out on Apple’s site, but the designer’s site has Cobalt and Blurple available for preorder. 

🕹️ The answer: B) Joystick. Before it was a must-have for gaming marathons and chomping ghosts in Pac-Man, the joystick had a far more explosive origin story, helping WWII fighter pilots target with precision. Basically, your Xbox controller has military roots, which makes snack breaks “tactical pauses.” If you did not get today’s trivia question right, you’ll have to console yourself. (Get it? Wow, tough crowd.)

🦃 How about a Thanksgiving joke then? A man in Phoenix calls his son in New York and says, “Your mother and I are divorcing, 45 years of misery is enough.” “Pop, what are you talking about?” the son screams. “We can’t stand the sight of each other any longer,” the man says. “Call your sister in Chicago and tell her,” and he hangs up. Frantic, the son calls his sister, who explodes on the phone. “Like heck they’re getting divorced,” she shouts. “I’ll take care of this.” She calls her dad and says, “You are NOT getting divorced. We’ll both be there tomorrow. Until then, don’t do a thing!” and hangs up. The man turns to his wife. “OK,” he says, “The kids are coming for Thanksgiving and paying their own way.”

🧑‍🎄 Special thanks to Incogni for supporting our Christmas Cash Giveaway: Keep your personal info private and secure this holiday season with Incogni. Get my spam-busting deal, 60% off now.

Tomorrow, your packages are in danger. I’m talking about thieves in trash bags, fake snakes and porch pirate warfare. This is the #1 free tech newsletter in the United States. 

🌐 When life buffers with stress this week, take a deep breath. It always loads eventually. — Kim

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