Backing up your iPhone is something you want to do when you’re updating or upgrading your phone. That way you can take that information and put it onto the new phone without having to worry about whether or not it all got copied over. And you’re going to be all the better for it. Here’s how to back up your iPhone. First thing, obviously, you’re going to need that lightning cable so that you can connect your iPhone or iPad to the computer. You’ll have to unlock the iPhone. Now, you may get a message on your iPhone, if it’s your first time connecting to the computer, that says, “Do you want to trust the computer?” Obviously, go ahead and click Trust the Computer. And once you do, you can go ahead and launch iTunes (if it’s not already set to auto-launch when you’re using it). Now the computer has found my iPhone, it’s recognized my iPhone. I’m going to go ahead and click on that. Click Sync Settings in the upper right-hand corner. The General tab is where you’re going to do the backup. The options you’re going to worry about are right here, backups. Right now, it’s set up to back up your most important data on your iPhone to iCloud. Obviously that’s not what we want to do in this case. We want to choose the second option, which is to back up all of the data on your iPhone to this Mac. And you want to go ahead and encrypt your local backup. If your laptop ever gets stolen, somebody breaks in your house, steals your computer, your data will be backed up and locked up. This process works for your iPhone or iPad, and if you have an Apple Watch connected to your iPhone, it’s also going to create a backup of your Apple Watch. Once you click Back Up Now, you’re just going to wait for it to complete the backup process. You’ll see this little wheel—that’s the progress pie—that shows you how far along you are in the backup process. It’ll give you prompts letting you know the process is done. What you can do if you want to get that is turn off iCloud photo, but you’re going to have to go through a bunch of other steps. If you have iCloud photo backup turned on, you’re going to have to go through a few different steps to get those photos onto your phone, and then to actually sync them with the computer. I just think the flash drive is a much simpler way to go. So definitely check that out and give that a look. Just click Restore Backup, and you’ll be able to replace and put everything back on your iPhone exactly as it was before you had to wipe your iPhone. You also have an option here to manage backups. So if you have multiple device backups—because they actually can be pretty big, I’ve had some that are up to almost 200 GB—you can manage or delete them if you’re running low on space on your computer.
