New phone day? Here’s how to back up and restore your iPhone using iTunes & iCloud, or Finder.
First things first, why back up your phone? Whether your phone is playing up and you need to restore it to factory settings and backup, or you’re looking to upgrade to a newer model and want to move everything over, it’s always handy to have everything backed up for safekeeping.
Depending on the platform, how you back up and restore your iPhone varies; Windows user can back up your phone through iTunes or iCloud, or if you’re running on macOS Catalina you can use the Finder application.
How to Back Up and Restore with iTunes
To backup, connect your phone to your computer and open up iTunes. Click the icon for your phone, and then ensure the option for this computer is selected in the ‘Backups’ section. Then simply click Back Up Now. iTunes will sync and back up your phone to your computer, and after the backup completes, the timestamp under ‘latest backup’ indicates the latest backup date and time.
To restore, you’ll need to disable the ‘Find my iPhone’ feature. To do this, go to Settings > (Your Name) > Find My > Find My iPhone. Switch Find My iPhone to off, type your password in, and press Turn Off.
With Find My turned off, connect the phone to your PC, and click Restore Backup. Make sure the correct back up is selected by checking the date and time, and click Restore. Sign into your iPhone when prompted, and after the restore completes, sign in again.
How to Back Up and Restore with iCloud
Back up your phone’s data directly from your iPhone by using iCloud, by opening Settings > (Your Name) > iCloud > iCloud Backups on your iPhone. Turn on the switch for iCloud Backup and tap the Back Up Now button that appears.
After you turn on iCloud Backup, a backup will automatically run in the background 24 hours after the last previous backup. For this to occur, your phone must be turned on and connected to the internet through Wi-Fi. It must also be connected to a power course, and your screen must be turned off.
To restore your iPhone from the iCloud backup, you can either set this up manually from factory settings, or automatically through another IOS device. If doing this manually, at the Apps & Data screen, choose Restore from iCloud Backup and then sign into iCloud with your Apple ID and Password. At the Choose Backup screen, tap the backup you want to restore.
How to Back Up and Restore with Finder
If you have a Mac running on macOS Catalina or higher, you can use Finder instead of iTunes to back up and restore your iPhone. To set this up, connect your iPhone to your Max and open Finder. Click Go > Computer in the menu, and then click your phone under the list of locations. Go ahead and click Trust on Finder, and then tap Trust on your phone and enter the passcode. As with iTunes, at the general tab in the backups section, you can chose whether you want to back up your data to iCloud , or to your Mac, and then click Back Up Now. When the backup has been initiated, the buttons in the Backups section in Finder will grey out, and a status message will appear at the bottom. When the backup is complete, the buttons will become available again, and the date for Last Backup on this Mac will indicate todays date and time.
To restore your phone from the backup, click Restore Backup, choose the correct backup from the time and date on the drop-down menu, and click Restore. Wait for the restore to complete and then sign back into your phone.
