Despite the wealth of critical personal data our iPhones hold, many people don’t back up their devices regularly. Usually, this is because the amount of data they’d need to back up in iCloud would vastly exceed their available iCloud storage space—and they don’t want to pay extra each month for an iCloud Plus subscription. Other times, people assume their iPhone data doesn’t change that much day to day, so they don’t need to back up their iPhone that often.
But not backing up your iPhone regularly can leave you in a world of hurt (i.e., data you can never get back) if it’s ever damaged, lost, or stolen. That’s why it is best practice to back up your iPhone every day. Here’s how to do that with and without iCloud.
Automatically back up each night with iCloud
Apple recommends backing up your iPhone’s data every day to protect against data loss, but the company also understands that many people don’t have the time to micromanage their iPhones that way. That’s why Apple has built an automatic backup feature into your iPhone. It’s called iCloud backup, and once you enable it, your iPhone will create a copy of all your important data that isn’t already synced to iCloud each night and securely store it in the company’s cloud.
Once your iCloud backup is uploaded, if you ever need to reformat your iPhone or get a new one because your previous one was lost or stolen, all your data can be easily restored to your new device. Your old iPhone may be kaput, but your irreplaceable, personalized data lives on.
If you have an iPhone, there’s no reason you shouldn’t be using automatic backups each night. The backups occur in the early morning hours while you are asleep, with your iPhone plugged in and connected to a Wi-Fi network.
The annoying thing about iCloud backups is that they can be quite large (mine is currently about 7 GB). That size exceeds the free 5 GB of iCloud storage Apple gives iPhone owners. In other words, if you want to use iCloud backups, you almost certainly need to pay for an iCloud Plus subscription, which gives you more online storage.
But the good news? You can subscribe to a 50GB iCloud Plus plan for just 99 cents a month—and you get other kinds of iCloud perks with it besides the tenfold increase in base storage.
To enable automatic iCloud backups, do the following:
- Open the Settings app.
- Tap your Apple Account name.
- Tap iCloud.
- Tap iCloud Backup.
- Toggle the Back Up This iPhone switch to ON (green).
Now, provided your iPhone has a Wi-Fi connection and is connected to power, it will back up automatically each night.
Manually back up your iPhone to iCloud
If, for whatever reason, you don’t want your iPhone to back up automatically to iCloud each night, you can back it up manually at any time. As a matter of fact, sometimes it’s good practice not to wait for the automatic nightly backup. For example, if you are about to install a major iOS system update, it’s good to initiate a manual iCloud backup beforehand.
To manually back up your iPhone to iCloud at any time, do the following:
- Open the Settings app.
- Tap your Apple Account name.
- Tap iCloud.
- Tap iCloud Backup.
- Tap Back Up Now.
Back up your iPhone to your Mac or PC
If you feel leery about having a backup of your iPhone floating around on Apple’s cloud, you’ll be glad to hear you can also back up your iPhone locally on your Mac or PC. This means a backup file is created on your iPhone and then stored on your personal computer.
Creating a local iPhone backup is arguably more secure, since it isn’t stored online and thus isn’t susceptible to hackers who may target data stored in Apple’s cloud infrastructure. You also don’t need to worry about iCloud subscription fees, because a local iPhone backup is limited only by the available space on your computer’s hard drive.
However, creating a local iPhone backup on your computer means that if your computer is ever unavailable, you won’t be able to access your iPhone backup.
To back up your iPhone to your Mac:
- Plug your iPhone into your Mac.
- Click the Finder icon.
- Click your iPhone from the Finder’s sidebar.
- Under General > Backups, select “Back up all of the data on your iPhone to this Mac.”
- Optionally, you can select the tick box to encrypt the local backup, which is generally a good idea. This requires a password to access the backup. But don’t forget it, because the data in an encrypted backup is unrecoverable without the password.
- Click the Back Up Now button.
To back up your iPhone to your PC:
- Plug your iPhone into your PC.
- Open the iTunes app.
- Click the phone icon.
- Select your iPhone.
- Click Summary.
- Under Backups, select This Computer.
- Optionally, you can select the tick box to encrypt the local backup, which is generally a good idea. This requires a password to access the backup. But don’t forget it, because the data in an encrypted backup is unrecoverable without the password.
- Click the Back Up Now button.
Many experts recommend storing a backup of your iPhone on both iCloud and your computer. That redundancy means you always have a backup of the backup if something happens to one of them.