Back up your iPhone or iPad the right way
Protect the personal data and settings on your iOS device
THERE ARE TWO ways to back up the data on your iPhone, iPad or iPod touch. You can back up to iCloud, or you can back up locally to your Mac.
With an iCloud backup, your backups can be accessed from anywhere you can get a Wi–Fi connection. The backups are always encrypted to keep your data secure, and you don’t need to remember to repeatedly back up your stuff: it can all happen automatically. Unfortunately, the 5GB you get free with your iCloud account is hilariously small, so you’ll need a paid iCloud storage plan — especially if you have multiple devices to back up. Local backups are stored on your Mac, so you’re only limited by the size of its hard drive or SSD. Transfers are usually much faster. But you need to remember to actually do the backup and to turn on encryption to keep your data safe: encryption is switched off by default.
With a local backup, data and settings are copied but iTunes and App Store purchases, PDFs downloaded to Apple Books, data already stored in iCloud such as photos and messages, and Apple Mail data are not. Note: if you don’t encrypt your backup, your Activity, Health and Keychain data won’t be backed up either.
It’s a similar story with iCloud. It doesn’t back up existing iCloud data such as photos, messages, calendars, SMS messages and so on, and it doesn’t copy iCloud Music Library or App Store content. CARRIE MARSHALL
Enable iCloud
iCloud backups are easy to set up on any iOS/iPadOS device. In this example we’ll enable it for our iPad. To do that, go into Settings and tap on our username in the top left. This brings up the iCloud page here.
Turn backups on
Scroll down the iCloud page to see the iCloud Backup. Tap it and you’ll see the toggle: green means the backup is on, tap it if grayed out. With backups enabled, this page will show you when the last backup was done.
Connect to your Mac
To make a local backup, you’ll need a wired connection to your Mac. Devices such as iPads drain power so don’t stress if you see this message when you connect.