How To Backup iPhone To iCloud (Or Your Computer)

[Music] so let me paint the picture you look after your iphone really well you guard it you protect it but one day you drop it and it breaks or you lose it or someone steals it or a man on stilts dressed as a giraffe uses a giant magnet and saps it out of your hands could happen you get a new iphone only to realize that you never backed up your old one yeah sorry to be such a debbie downer look you've got to back up your iphone and today i'm going to show you how to do it using a few different methods one of them is icloud and look it's going to be okay i promise every icloud account gets five gigabytes of storage for free but most people have more than five gigabytes of data on their phone or they have more than one ios device that needs backing up to that single icloud account and maybe one day maybe apple will change this and make the free tier have more storage and that would be so easy for all of us but in the meantime let's see what we can do [Music] icloud doesn't back up everything on your phone things like apps or music or anything purchased with your apple id doesn't back up basically apple has a receipt that you already bought them and lets you re-download those things for free things like email contacts and calendars are synced to a gmail account or yahoo account or whatever your email account is also if you're still using yahoo we really should talk now the first thing we need to do is figure out the size of your iphone's backup file go to settings tap on your name at the top then tap icloud manage storage and backups there is a list showing all the devices that are backed up or trying to back up with your apple id select the backup file for your phone now look at the top three lines last backup backup size and next backup size if your next backup size is under five gigabytes you should be good yay that's awesome but if you haven't backed up to icloud in a while your next backup size could be pretty large and if this number is over five gigabytes you're gonna need to do some work so below the next backup size it's a list of everything that's gonna take up space in that icloud file and you can unselect things to make the file smaller but let's talk about a very simple fix that will save you a ton of time and effort all right no one likes to do this but you can also pay apple 99 cents a month to get icloud plus and increase your storage to 50 gigabytes and i know i know you pay apple a lot of money for the phone and applecare and why are you gonna pay them even more it's like the principle of the whole thing i totally get it but if you lost your iphone and everything on it and then you got a new phone and someone told you that they could give you a copy of all your old stuff from your lost phone for just 12 you'd likely just say yes and that's exactly how much it costs to get extra storage on icloud for one year now if you're not jazzed about buying icloud plus and you only care about your photos i have a solution for you for many of us the stuff that takes up the most space on our phone is going to be photos and videos if all you're concerned about are your pictures you can enable icloud photos to sync your iphone's photos and videos and not back up your entire iphone to icloud yet just to be clear the only thing you'd have backed up or technically synced to icloud would be the photos and videos in your photos app if you have more than five gigabytes of photos and videos this approach won't work unless you buy icloud plus even if your photos and videos take up less than five gigabytes of space keep in mind that things like your message history and anything in it aren't backed up now that said a dollar a month just to have everything backed up i mean but let's say you just don't want to use icloud at all you can still back up your phone to your computer if your computer is running mac os catalina or newer use the finder window to back up your iphone first thing you gotta do is plug your iphone into your mac you might be prompted to hit trust this computer on your phone next open up a finder window from the dock from the sidebar under locations select your iphone next on the right hand side click on the general tab next click the backup now button now depending on how much data you have this could take a few minutes to half an hour to back up also if you don't want to re-enter all of your iphone's passwords for apps and accounts you can check the encrypt local backup option you're going to be prompted to enter a password and make sure you don't lose the password because otherwise you won't be able to install your encrypted backup onto a new iphone keep in mind your backup is as safe as your computer so if something happens to your computer then yeah there goes the backup and remember backing up is different than syncing your iphone to your mac now if you have an older mac or a pc don't worry here's how you can back your iphone to it [Music] remember itunes well if you're running mac os mojave or earlier or you're on a pc you can just plug your iphone into your computer and back it up to itunes instead of using icloud open itunes now if you're on a pc you might actually have to download the app first and then after you give your devices permission to talk to each other click on the tiny super small iphone icon then scroll down to the backup section and choose automatically back up to this computer and it will make a backup on your computer i hope one of these tips helps you back up your iphone and i sincerely hope that you never lose your phone or have it stolen by that aforementioned giraffe man with a magnet look it could happen don't rule it out but now i want to hear from you do you have any tips for backing up your phone or do you have any stories you can share about losing your data that we all could learn from throw them in the comments also we're going to be doing these apple stuff videos every week let us know what you'd like to see us cover and last do all the youtube things like subscribe hit the bell and thank you so much for watching [Music] you

Channel: CNET

Views: 152,234

Keywords: CNET, Technology, Tech, mobile phone, apple, smartphone, back up iphone, iphone, backup phone, backup

Id: 8XuRnbzjJZI

Length: 7min 6sec (426 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 07 2022