> Backing up before upgrading
Before upgrading my iPhone to the next major version of iOS, I back it up to iCloud. While preparing for iOS 15, I noticed last year’s backup is missing. What’s happened to it, and what should I do this year?
Backing up your iPhone and iPad, as well as your Mac, is an important precaution to take before installing any major update, and Apple makes good provision to do that both to iCloud and locally. Those two alternatives differ slightly, and it’s wisest to use both if you can.
Backups to iCloud are outside your control, as Apple automatically deletes them when you don’t make any further backup for 180 days. This is explained in support documents such as bit.ly/ml186icloudstorage, but it’s unclear why this happens automatically, even when you’ve got plenty of free storage available and might have preferred to keep the backup.
It’s worth noting exactly what each backs up before doing so, described in bit.ly/ml186icloudbackup. If you back up to your computer, then Activity, Health and Keychain information will only be included if the backup is encrypted, as explained at bit.ly/ml186icloudencryption.
Unlike some forms of backup in older versions of macOS, iPhone and iPad backups don’t include that version of iOS/iPadOS. If something goes wrong with the update, you cannot use a backup to restore the previous version of iOS/iPadOS, but they’ll let you reset your iPhone or iPad, then restore all your docs and info from the backup, which should address almost all the problems you could encounter with a big update.