One awesome thing about iCloud is ‘Find my iPhone’. This service allows you to track and recover your Macs, iPhones, iPads and iPod Touches if they’re ever lost or (God forbid) stolen. This service is free with all iOS devices. But what happens when you actually lose a device? How do you recover it, send a message to it, or remotely wipe it?
In this tutorial we will be showing you how to recover your iOS device via iCloud and Find my iPhone. This tutorial requires that your iOS device has iCloud enabled. This is usually done when first setting up your iOS device.
Recovering Your iOS Device
Let’s start by launching your favorite web browser and heading to the iCloud website and logging into your account. Once you’ve logged in, look towards the righthand side of the window and click on the button labeled “Find My iPhone”. When you do this you will be taken to the Find My iPhone service and may be asked to enter your iCloud password again.
Look towards the righthand side of the window where you will see a list of all the devices that are linked to your iCloud account. The device is trackable and online if there is a green lightbulb next to the device’s name. When you click on your device’s name, you will see it appear on the map which is located towards the center of the iCloud window. This is showing the current location of your device. If you click on the Information button which is located to the right of the device’s name on the map, a pop-up window will appear.
From this pop-up window are a few different options: “Remote Wipe”, “Remote Lock” and “Play Sound Or Send Message”. If you would like to set a passcode on your device remotely, click on the button “Remote Lock”.
You will then be prompted to set a passcode on your device. If you would like to make your phone start playing a noise as well as receive a message, click “Play Sound Or Send Message”. You will then be prompted to type a message to send to your phone and to choose if you would like your phone to play a sound. Finally, “Remote Wipe” should only be used if there is no chance of recovering your device.
Why? Because once you have wiped your device you can no longer track it via iCloud.
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