Hello,

I am trying to help my girlfriend backup her iPhone and Macbook.

I am a bit unfamiliar with the Apple ecosystem, and she’s still not very familiar with the technical aspects of it.

With my android and PC, it seems a bit more straightforward. Certain programs or services will backup everything, and I can restore it all exactly as it was at that time.

But the Apple webpage for iCloud Backup lists a bunch of things it backs up, meaning, it doesn’t backup everything?

I’m trying to figure out the best way to make backups of her phone and laptop so she can restore them exactly as they were when each backup was made.

Do iPhones and Macs have this type of option? Backing up everything, like taking an image of them at that point, including all apps, all files, all settings, every little thing, and then using that to restore them at a later date if needed?

Thank you for taking the time to read my post.

Any direction or guidance you might be able to provide is greatly appreciated.

I’ll update with any solutions or options for your opinions if I’m able to find any.

  • chaos@beehaw.org
    2·
    10 days ago

    As mentioned, iCloud does this for the phone. Apple makes this very easy, it has the advantage of basically always running so you never have to remember anything, but it’s also yet another subscription unless you can somehow squeeze into the free 5 gigabyte plan.

    You also have the old-school option of backing up the phone to a Mac. This used to be iTunes, but now the music bits of iTunes are the Music app, and the “manage your iPhone/iPod” bits, including device backup, live in the Finder. If you plug the iPhone into the Mac, it should show up there with all sorts of syncing options including backup. I would advise also encrypting that backup with a password, not so much for security but at least in the past, an unencrypted backup didn’t include some sensitive data like health but an encrypted one did, so even setting it up with password “password” was useful.

    Unfortunately, the back up to a Mac option isn’t automatic. With some finagling, you can set it up to connect wirelessly, so it’ll appear to be plugged in when they’re on the same WiFi, but you still have to initiate the backup on the Mac.

    For both phone backup options, you’ll get the important bits backed up but not quite everything. The backup won’t include the apps themselves, for example, when you restore it’ll just get them from the App Store again. Apps also have some control of how they get backed up, so you may find that upon restoring, some apps are more of a fresh start than others, you might have to log in again, etc. For the most part, this all works pretty well though.

    For backing up the Mac itself, as a Real Computer you have a few more options. Apple doesn’t offer Mac iCloud backup, but they do have Time Machine for backing up to an external drive or a network drive. There are also services like Backblaze that offer cloud backup for Macs. And there’s the classic “just save your important files to a second place” option too.