Start here›The same thing on four devices
How do you do this on devices?
This page is for the problem in front of you now. Where a setting lives, on whichever of the four they have brought in. If what you want is what to teach next week — ten sessions across a whole term, in an order — that is A term’s plan. Some subjects sit on both, on purpose: you teach accounts as a session, and you look accounts up when it breaks.
One in five of our members brings a Windows laptop and a phone from a different world to the same lesson. The hard part is not the buttons — it is that the same thing is called something different on each one, and nobody ever says so out loud. This says so out loud.
How to use it
Read the one idea to the member first. It is true whatever they own, and it is usually the part that was missing. Then use the name for their device and go and find it together.
⛔ It deliberately does not give you the taps. Menu paths change with every release — two of the names on this page changed in the last two years — and a wrong instruction followed in front of somebody costs more than looking it up together does.
Something to put in their hand
Every question below has a free eSafety course against it, chosen for the device they actually own. Print the sheet for that device, circle the two or three you covered, and give it to them on the way out. It comes out as two pages — measured, not assumed, so nobody is caught short standing at the printer with twenty to run off.
1. Which account am I signed into?
Every device is signed into an account that owns the photos, the contacts and the backup. It is almost always an email address, and most people have more than one without knowing it.
⚠️ A Windows laptop and an iPhone have two completely separate accounts that know nothing about each other. That is the single most common confusion in this club, and it is not the member being muddled — it genuinely is two different things.
2. My storage is full
There are two different storages and they are both called storage. One is the room inside the device. The other is the room in the cloud that you rent. Either can fill up, and the messages barely distinguish them.
⚠️ When a phone says it is full it usually means the cloud account, not the phone. Deleting photos off the phone will not fix that, and people delete precious things trying.
3. Where have my photos gone?
Photos live in an app, and the app may or may not be copying them to the cloud. The copy is what survives a lost phone.
⚠️ Windows laptop plus an iPhone means photos in two places that do not talk to each other. “It is not on my computer” is usually true, and usually not a fault.
4. Is any of this actually backed up?
A copy kept somewhere else, so that losing the device does not lose what is on it. Very often it is switched off, or the cloud is full, and nobody has looked in years.
5. Where are my passwords kept?
The device is already remembering most of them, in a list the person is allowed to open and read. Almost nobody has been shown it.
6. Make it bigger and easier to read
Two separate things on every platform: the size of the text, and the size of everything. Changing one and not the other is why it still looks wrong.
7. Why does it keep buzzing?
A list of who is allowed to interrupt you, which almost nobody has ever edited.
⭐ The easy one — it is called the same thing on all four. Worth saying out loud to somebody who has decided everything is different everywhere, because it is not.
8. What can the apps see?
Camera, microphone, location, contacts, photos — granted app by app, and revocable one at a time.
9. Finding it when it is lost
Make it ring, see it on a map, or lock it from somewhere else. Only works if it was switched on before the device went missing.
⭐ One idea, three different names, and one of them changed last year. This is the whole reason this page exists.
10. Is this a scam?
The one that has no settings answer at all. It is a judgement, and it is the same judgement on every device.
⭐ Included precisely because there is nothing to look up. Send them to Scam Watch on the club's own site, and to eSafety. The device is not the answer here; you are.
Not here? Ask it.
If you looked for something on this page and it was missing, that is worth more to us than anything already on it. It means a member asked you something we have not covered. Put it here and it gets answered for everybody.
Names checked 29 August 2026
Two changed recently: Apple ID became Apple Account in September 2024, and Find My Device became Find Hub in May 2025. If you meet one that is wrong, say so here and it gets fixed the same day — a page like this is only worth having if it is kept honest.
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