It’s always a good idea to back up your iPhone or iPad. In today’s day and age, our most important data is probably stored on our smartphones. Phones
Store our photos, messages, contacts, etc.
The good news is that if you have an iPhone, Apple offers an easy way to constantly keep your iPhone backed up to the company’s cloud service, called iCloud. In this article,
I’ll explain everything you need to know aboutHow to back up your iPhone to iCloud
So, what Is An iPhone iCloud Backup?
Just like other tech companies out there, Apple has a host of cloud services that you can take advantage of. Apple has named its cloud services “iCloud”. Apple’siCloud
services has numerous features, including ad-free email, bookmark syncing, online file store, etc. But the most important
iCloud feature is the iPhone backup.
The iPhone’s iCloud backup feature lets users create a copy of their iPhone’s data and store it on Apple’s cloud. This copy of your data allows you to
easily retrieve all of your data
in the event you ever want to reset or restore your iPhone.
Your iPhone iCloud backup also simplifies the process of transferring all your data from one iPhone to another. When you purchase a new iPhone, you only need
to log into your iCloud account on it and the new iPhone will start fetching data from your iCloud backup and putting it on your new iPhone.
What Is Stored In An iCloud Backup?
Your iCloud iPhone backup doesn’t store all the data you have on your iPhone – just the most essential bits. Here’s
everything Apple says gets included
in your iPhone iCloud backup:
- App data
- Apple Watch backups
- iPhone settings
- Home screen and app layout
- iMessage, text (SMS) and MMS messages
- Purchase history from Apple services, such as your music, movies, TV shows, apps, and books
- Ringtones
- Photos and videos on your iPhone
- Visual Voicemail password (requires the SIM card that was in use during backup)
You may notice that things such as emails and contacts aren’t included in the above list. That’s because emails and contacts are already stored online through
your email provider (which could be iCloud, or another service such as Gmail). Because they’re already stored online, there’s no need for them to be stored
in your iCloud backup.
How Do I Backup My iPhone To iCloud?
Fortunately, it’s easy to back up iPhone data to iCloud. You just require3 things:
- An iPhone
- An iCloud account
- Wi-Fi internet connection
The purpose of having an iPhone is quite straight forward (it’s what you’re backing up to iCloud). As for an iCloud account, you’ll have one if you own an iPhone. Your
iCloud account is associated with your Apple ID. Lastly, you’ll need a Wi-Fi internet connection to back up your iPhone to iCloud.
Got all that? Perfect. Here’s how you back up iPhone data to iCloud:
- . Connect your iPhone to your Wi-Fi network.
- Launch the Settings app on your iPhone.
- Tap on your profile at the top of the iPhone’s Settings app.
- Tap on iCloud.
- Tap on iCloud Backup.
- On the “Backup” screen, toggle the iCloud Backup switch to ON position
- A “Back Up Now” button will appear. Tap it.
After you tap the “Back Up Now” button, your iPhone will perform its first backup to iCloud. Note, this could take some time depending on the amount of data on
your iPhone. And if you’re iCloud backup is just taking way too long, we recommend that you
free up some storage space on the iPhone.
But the good thing is after this first backup, you won’t need to manually backup your iPhone to iCloud. Your iPhone will automatically back up your iPhone
to iCloud daily as long as you’ve followed the above given steps and your iPhone is plugged to power source and connected to Wi-Fi network and the screen is
locked.
All of the above happens when we plug our iPhone to power before we go to bed to sleep, meaning your iPhone will do daily backups to iCloud
as you sleep.
