Tip: How to back up your iPhone

You may not often think about it, but backing up your iPhone is something you should do regularly. This ensures that you do not lose all your photos, videos, and other data if something happens to your phone.

Back up iPhone with iTunes

One way to make an iPhone backup is with iTunes. You connect your iPhone to your PC or Mac via a USB cable. Open iTunes and select your iPhone from the menu. You will find this top left as an icon in iTunes. In the ‘Overview’ tab, under ‘Backup’, check ‘Automatically create backups on this computer’ button. Every time you connect the iPhone to your computer, iTunes automatically creates a backup. Do not be alarmed if it takes longer the first time, the times after it will go faster because then only the differences with the last backup will be updated. If you do not want to update automatically, you can also back up manually in iTunes. You do this as follows:

1. Open iTunes and click on your iPhone in the top left corner;
2. Select ‘Overview’;
3. You can make a backup copy manually under ‘Backup’.

Back up iPhone with iCloud

If you choose iCloud, you go to ‘Settings> iCloud> iCloud backup’ on your iPhone. Then set the switch to green and choose ‘Make backup now’. Note that you only get 5GB of storage for free from Apple, then you pay extra for the space you need more. What you cannot save with iCloud are apps: you will have to download them again if you restore an iPhone. These will be transferred when you restore a backup copy from a PC to an iPhone.