Celebrating World Backup Day with your Apple Devices — 4 Different Ways to Backup your iPhone, iPad and Mac
31st March is celebrated as World Backup Day — a day to not only remind you to create backups of your data-holding devices but also create awareness of backups among your friend groups and family members.
Introduction
Ask me what I learned today and I shall tell you about ‘World Backup Day’. Well, not all about it but at least as much as I could read about it in the last few hours. In the very first few minutes, they had me convinced of how important backups are and the different methods that should be used for creating backups. While I did know most of these techniques beforehand, there are quite a few new ones I learned today.
A backup is a copy of all the important files on your devices such as photos, videos, documents, emails, calendars, contacts, etc, and storing that copy somewhere safe. Probably, in different places and different formats too.
If you are an Apple Fanboy like me you definitely have more than a single Apple product and are worried about the data on it. So fear no more, we shall discuss all the possible ways to create backups for your iPhone, iPad, and Mac. But first, let us understand how important backups actually are.
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Why should you back up your devices?
‘Prevention is better than cure’
Unfortunately, in the tech world, if you don’t have a copy of your data before you lose or damage the device it is on, it is not possible to get that data back. A site you should definitely visit today is worldbackupday.com. They have beautiful graphics to get you convinced just like they convinced me:
Those numbers are a bit terrifying. With this story, I want to convince most Apple users out of the 21% of people who have never made a backup and help them make one.
How should you create a backup?
There are two very popular methods to do this:
- Online Backup Services: In our case, this means iCloud Drive. By default, Apple provides 5GB of free iCloud Storage. In case you want to create iCloud Backups for your iPhone and iPad, you will have to upgrade to higher iCloud storage options. This method will cost you more (every month) but also keeps your data more safe as it does not involve any physical media getting damaged or lost.
- External Storage Backup: This includes Hard Disk Drives (HDD), Solid State Drives (SSD), or simply a USB Disk. There is a single upfront cost in purchasing these. However, there is a risk of losing these storage devices or them getting damaged (like dropping them off the table multiple times).
Apart from these, backups stored on external storage devices should be done keeping in mind the principle of redundancy — having multiple external storage devices have the backup copy and storing these storage devices in different locations to eliminate chances of accidental data loss or theft.
Now let us understand how your Apple devices can be backed up. Starting with your Mac.
Backing up your Mac
For your Mac, the only possible way to create backups is by using an HDD or SSD. iCloud doesn’t backup your Mac and hence some disk drive needs to be used.
Apple has a native software known as Time Machine which takes hourly backups of your Mac and stores them on the external storage disk. It optimises storage all by itself by simply deleting older hourly backups when you are about to run out of storage on the disk drive.
All you have to do is mount your external storage on your Mac and follow the instructions on the screen to turn your external storage device into a Time Machine device. This includes formatting it and changing its file system to APFS.
I have two HDD for Time Machine backups of my MacBook — one does a weekly backup (every Friday) while the other one does a monthly backup (last day of every month).
Backing up your iPhone/iPad
Here’s the good news: there is more than one way to create a backup for your iPhone/iPad. Let’s start with the best one:
iCloud Backup
iCloud Backups are the most easiest and convenient method for backing up your iPhone/iPad. Of course, it requires you to pay for the extra iCloud Storage (as much as the data on these devices). But after that, everything is taken care of by your device when it’s on WiFi or mobile network.
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Backup to your Mac/PC
The old term used for this was iTunes Backup and in case you are backing up your iPhone/iPad to your Windows PC, you might still call it so. For Mac users, this happens directly from Finder. The only drawback of this method is that it requires you to manually connect your iPhone to your Mac/PC and hit a few buttons to start the process.
I found two amazing hacks with this backup method — I found out that it is possible to automatically sync your iPhone/iPad to your Mac over WiFi. It’s not 100% reliable and could fail for some unknown reason.
Secondly, if you don’t have enough storage on your Mac, you can create an alias of the backup folder (on your Mac) on an external storage device of your choice. This will save you quite a lot of storage on your Mac. Here’s an article to help you with it.
Using Sandisk iXpand (for Photos, Contacts & Calendars)
This is my absolute favorite backup method. I consider my photos and videos very dear to me. There are not enough copies I could create of them and even though my iPhone, iPad, and Mac have multiple backup copies of them both on iCloud and other HDDs, I still feel the need for more.
Which is why I got myself a Sandisk iXpand USB Drive. This drive is made specially for iPhone and backs up your entire photo library as well as your contacts, and calendar events. Moreover, you can also create backups for your Google Photos, Instagram, and FaceBook accounts.
It does an absolutely incredible job at backing up your pictures and videos and the double-sided Lightning-USB 2.0 port also allows you to connect to your Mac/PC and view all your backed-up data on it.
Without an iXpand drive, it is almost impossible to view your Apple Photo Library in a properly structured way like this so I feel the iXpand drive is completely worth your money.
Conclusion
Those are all the ways you could create backups for your Apple devices in your home. While iCloud storage options can be a bit expensive they also tend to eliminate theft/damage risks that usually come with external storage device options. In case you do choose external storage devices, I would recommend choosing multiple storage devices keeping in mind the principle of redundancy.
In my case, I have 4x 1TB Hard Disk Drives storing Time Machine backups of my Mac and local backups of my iPhone and iPad. I have named all these four HDDs differently, giving each one a fun name after some of my favourite fictional characters. You can see that in some of the screenshots above.
This World Backup Day, let’s take a pledge to backup all our important data from our devices and even inform our friends and family members about it to create more awareness about backups. One simple step you could take is to share this story with your loved ones to remind them of the importance of backups and how they should be done.
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