How to Back Up Your iPhone to iCloud

While you can back up your iPhone using iTunes, you can also back up your iPhone to iCloud, which is an easy and convenient method. Here’s how to how back up your iPhone to iCloud.

It’s important to back up your iPhone so that you don’t lose any apps, photos, settings, etc, if your device ever crashes or dies on you. If that happens, the only way to get that information back is from a backup, and if you don’t have your iPhone backed up, you’ll be out of luck.

Now, backing up to iCloud is really easy and convenient, and you don’t have to bother with plugging in your iPhone to your computer and firing up iTunes just to back up your device, which can be annoying for some people and might be a big reason why some users don’t back up their devices.

However, you can simply access iCloud in the settings on your iPhone and back up your important files from there. You can literally do it anytime, anywhere, but we recommend being around a WiFi connection, since the backup is sent over the internet to Apple’s iCloud servers.

In any case, if you’re wanting to back up your iPhone the easy way, iCloud would be the way to go, and here’s how to do it.

Backing Up Your iPhone to iCloud

First off, before you back up your iPhone to iCloud, it’s important know what exact information is backed up to iCloud as opposed to backing up with iTunes.

iCloud backups don’t back up everything, but rather it only backs up what Apple says are the “most important data” on your iPhone, which is your camera roll, accounts, documents, and settings. More specially, Apple also says that it doesn’t back up the following:

• Data that’s already stored in the cloud, like contacts, calendars, notes, My Photo Stream, and iCloud Photo Library
• Data stored in other cloud services, like Gmail and Exchange mail
• Apple Pay information and settings
• Touch ID settings
• Content you didn’t get directly from iTunes, App, or iBooks Stores, like imported MP3s, videos, or CDs

With that said, if an iCloud backup is still something that you want to perform, here’s how to do it.

First off, open up the Settings app and then navigate to iCloud > Backup. It might already be turned on, but if it isn’t, just tap on the toggle switch next to iCloud Backup so that it turns green. At that point, you can tap on Back Up Now down below to begin backing up your iPhone to iCloud. You can cancel the backup any time by pressing Cancel Backup. Otherwise, let it do its thing.

That’s all there is to it! And for even more convenience, your iPhone will automatically backup to iCloud whenever it’s plugged in, locked, and connected to WiFi, so you almost don’t even need to back up your iPhone to iCloud manually, as it can be all automatic if you want.

Of course, though, if you want to perform a full backup of your iPhone (and you should regularly), then you’ll need to do that through iTunes, where you’ll have to plug in your iPhone, open up iTunes on your Mac or Windows machine, and then back up your iPhone from there. This method will back up absolutely everything, so there’s no worries about losing anything if something bad should happen to your device.

No matter what method you choose for backing up your iPhone, the most important thing is that you back up your iPhone regularly, so that any newer files that were added to your iPhone don’t get lost if something terrible should happen to your device.