A couple of weeks back my wife left her iPhone behind after taking a Uber ride. As I am our household “IT support”, obviously I’ve immediately got a phone call.
I wrote a blog post about it and thought of sharing a summary of the lessons learned in case it helps someone. (spoil alert: the biggest lesson is to get prepared before it happens!)
- In such situations you get so stressed out that you don’t want to be looking for places where to find information. Do your homework before it happens. Search for your most critical services, get phone numbers, emails, etc and store them securely on 1Password, Last Passwords, Notes, wherever…but do it! And if possible share them with someone you trust!
- Having iCloud backup switch on removed a lot of the stress in an already stressful situation
- 2-factor authentication works most times only until the phone is lost. I now have a high priority task to review all of our 2FA and move away as much as possible from codes sent by text message
- Uber advertises in their website that you can use a friend’s phoe in case you loose your own. To access this page however it requires you to login…which, as you might have guessed, is only possible with the 2-factor authentication via text message. Uber is not the only service doing this, so do check point 1) above.
- “Find my Phone” doesn’t require 2-factor authentication and that’s a good thing
- Realised that my wife’s iCloud account hasn’t a second device linked to (mea culpa). It has now, and that could’ve save a lot of time.
- Setting up 2-factor authentication in a separate app (e.g. Auth) is a good call. But ensure the app is also available/linked to other devices
Do you know of others to add to the list? Hit reply! 
I also recommend reading this blog post by Fraiser Speirs