Safeguard your iOS data

If you lose your iPhone, don’t let your data vanish with it

For some people, an iPhone is just for communication. For others, iPhones and iPads are hyper-portable computers through which they live out major parts of their lives. In either case, if you do nothing to safeguard your data, it will be gone if your device is lost or damaged beyond repair.

Elsewhere in this feature, we look specifically at safeguarding photos and videos, mostly through iCloud. In addition, iCloud can sync your Notes, Contacts, Calendar, and Safari (bookmarks, website account details, and more) across your devices. Many third-party apps and games also utilize iCloud. This means that when you get a new device, all this data should be fully recoverable.

The problem is everything else. If you’ve created amazing art in a painting app, or cracked level 50 in a brain-bending puzzler, that data will be gone if you lose your iPhone and those apps don’t use iCloud as storage. And then there are things like your personal setup, down to how you’ve arranged icons on your Home screens.

We strongly recommend you back up your iOS devices, and — short of using third-party software — there are two ways to do so: iCloud and iTunes.

Back up to iCloud

To start backing up to iCloud, open Settings, tap your name at the top of the page, and go to iCloud > iCloud Backup. When iCloud Backup is switched on, backups will occur when your device is connected to power and Wi-Fi, and locked. On this screen you can also manually make a backup (Back Up Now) and see when the most recent backup occurred.

Note that you need enough iCloud storage to back up all your devices. The 5GB you get for free might not be enough. Our advice is to buy more when you need to — for many people, the $0.99 50GB tier will be ample, and that’s a small price to pay to ensure your iOS data is safeguarded. However, you can also choose to prune your backups in Manage Storage > Backup. Tap a device there, then deselect items to remove them from the next backup — but be very mindful that unless you have a copy of that data elsewhere, you’ve now made it vulnerable to loss.

Generally, iCloud backups are robust, and are useful not only when a device is lost but also as a means of restoring settings and data when you get a new device. (Note that apps are not included in backups — they will be downloaded from Apple’s servers, assuming they’re still available.) However, iCloud backups can fail, so we recommend that you periodically back up iOS devices to iTunes as well.

Back up to iTunes

To do this, connect your iOS device to your Mac, click the device’s icon near the top left of iTunes, select Summary, and click Back Up Now. If you want to include account passwords, Health, and HomeKit data in the backup, you need to click the Encrypt checkbox prior to backing up. Once the backup is complete, it provides you with an alternative option for restoring your device.

It’s worth noting that iOS backups are less flexible than Time Machine ones, in the sense that you can’t recover individual items. They’re really designed to restore an entire device to the state it was in when last backed up. That said, we’ll later show you how to use iMazing to recover single photos from an iTunes backup (which can be from an old device or a current one). This app can be used to export other data as well.

So, you don’t need to choose between iCloud and iTunes backups; use both for all-round protection and convenience. If you lost your iPhone tomorrow, you could lose important data. Make sure it’s backed up.