How to back up your iPhone and iPad - Abu Sufian Kayas

Data loss is a fact of life, which is why it's so important to know how to back up your iPhone or your iPad properly. Thankfully, we have services like iCloud that can make automatic iPhone backups, so they are easily retrievable in the case of a shattered or damaged iPhone, but there are a number of ways to make sure you properly back up the data on your iPhone or iPad.

Unfortunately, iCloud isn't the best solution for backing up data, particularly because Apple isn't great when it comes to cloud services. Security is a big concern with iCloud, and if you ever want to get more storage if you have a lot of data store on your iPhone that you want to back up, it's quite pricey compared to competitors. Apple also gives you a mere 5GB of cloud storage so it's hardly possible to back up all of the important data on your iOS device, especially if you have a large photo library full of special moments you want to keep

That said, there are plenty of other ways to make sure your data is safe by backing up your iPhone across a few free services. The first step is, of course, making sure you have an iPhone backup on your PC or Mac.

The good news is that every time you plug your iPhone into your Mac or PC using the supplied USB cable – or even passed through via a connection on another piece of hardware, such as a speaker dock – your iPhone is backed up quickly and automatically.

If you're feeling a bit paranoid – or, you need to force an iPhone backup since you know you're about to migrate your data to a new device or install an new version of iOS – then right-click on your iPhone in iTunes' Source pane and choose Back Up from the contextual menu.

You can have multiple iPhones and iPads synced to a single library, and can check their backups from the Devices tab in iTunes' preferences.

Hover over an entry and check the phone number, serial number and hardware IMEI reference to identify it.