How to backup your iPhone and iPad
If you want to preserve all your treasured data, photos, etc on your iPhone, iPad or iPod touch, you will need a reliable backup.
If you are like me, you will probably at some point, lose, or break your iPhone. It might just stop working one day, or suffer an internal error which destroys all your data. Personally, my photos are probably the most important thing I own, and I really don’t want to lose them.
It is a common misconception (guilty of believing this), that your iPhone backup up directly to the cloud? Who would blame you for thinking you get a free cloud backup on the device you have just spent more than £1,000 on. Unfortunately, you will be wrong because Apple only gives you 5GB of cloud storage.
How I backup my iPhone
I have a few choices, either inbuilt iCloud or with BOBcloud. To be honest, I use both. I use iCloud because it allows me to share my photos easily, and sync them across my devices. I also use BOBcloud so that I have control over where my data is stored so I know it will never be lost. I use the cloud (Wasabi and Microsoft Azure), and locally on my PC.
iCloud
iTunes
iCloud
iCloud is instantly recognisable as the inbuilt backup location for Apple’s devices. It is the only reliable on-phone backup application which works seamlessly and whilst the phone is locked.
If you want to learn more about iCloud and the storage plans, head over to Apple’s site.
There is no doubt that iCloud is an excellent service, however, if you want more control over where your iPhone data is stored, the iTunes \ BOBcloud option is for you.
iTunes
iTunes is the application used to backup and restore iPhones to a local device either via a lightning cable or Wi-Fi. In the early days, new iPhones had to be activated via iTunes and where a lot of downloads were synced.
The first thing I am going to do is open iTunes on my PC and plug in my iPhone. The first time I did this I had to allow access from the iPhone screen and set up a new device.
You’ll see in the screenshot below that my iPhone is already backing up to iCloud.
Before I can backup the iPhone using BOBcloud, I need to start a manual backup and store the data locally on my PC.
Apple’s website states the default location for iTunes to store backups is C:\Users\(username)\AppData\Roaming\Apple Computer\MobileSync\Backup\, however, I found my backups in C:\Users\alex\Apple\MobileSync\Backup
It is possible to automate local backups and BOBcloud will backup the local backup to the cloud. I don’t have my local backup in iTunes enabled because I like to manually check these things. Daya-to-day backups are run over iCloud directly from my iPhone, so I always have a basic level of protection.
All I need to do now is install the BOBcloud software on my PC and backup C:\Users\alex\Apple\MobileSync\Backup to the cloud.
Because this is a very simple file system backup, we can use our Enterprise or Business service. I opted for the lowest cost Business Desktop service. If you are new to our software, here is the installation walkthrough
I used the default storage destination which is Wasabi’s object storage in Holland, and I also used a USB disk on my PC.
Restoring your iPhone from BOBcloud is a simple reversal of the backup process. If you no longer have the local iTunes backup, simply restore it from your BOBloud storage destination. Then use iTunes to restore your iPhone or iPad.
Summing up then, I am backing up my iPhone and iPad using iCloud and BOBcloud via iTunes.
Alex – Techie
How much to backup a 256GB iphone 6?
This will work well for our users. How will it work with licenses?
@jmack
Pricing is based on storage used and QTY of BOBcloud accounts.
The Free account will give you 10GB of space (probably not enough though).
The Business account will provide unlimited cloud storage (yours) for £18 a year.
Contact us through the site for a proper quote.
@Hamjet
No extra licenses required.
Run iTunes on the device where your BOBcloud account is running and the iPhone backup will be added under the existing license.
A rough cost for 256GB using the Business service would be just over £1 per month on an annual contract.
Contact us through the site for a proper quote.
Great article – thanking you