Software · guide

How to backup iphone, and what each kind leaves out

By Alberto Gulotta · Updated 23 September 2026 · 9 min read

Asking how to backup iphone sounds like one question with one answer. It is two products with different contents, and the difference only becomes visible on the day you need the backup — which is the worst possible day to discover it.

Take the iCloud side first, because that sentence of Apple’s reverses what the word promises. A backup sounds like a complete copy. It works the other way round: the things that are already syncing to iCloud are left out of the backup. Apple states the rule and not the reasoning behind it, but the rule itself is unambiguous.

That is reassuring and it has a sharp edge. Anything syncing to iCloud is not protected by the backup — it is protected by the sync, and a sync copies deletions as faithfully as it copies photographs. Delete an album by accident and it leaves every device at once. The backup is not standing behind it in the way the word suggests.

The computer backup has the opposite shape and the opposite trap. It is genuinely more complete, it costs nothing, nobody else holds it — and by Apple’s own statement it is not encrypted unless you tick a box that is off when you start.

Which produces the practical instruction this whole guide exists to give. If you are making a backup on a computer, tick Encrypt local backup and use a password you will still have in two years. An unencrypted local backup is not a bad backup, but it is a partial one, and the parts missing are the ones you cannot rebuild by hand.

The routes themselves are short. For iCloud: Settings, your name, iCloud, iCloud Backup, then turn on Back Up This iPhone. Tap Back Up Now to do one immediately. On Windows the equivalent is the iTunes app — click the iPhone button near the top left, click Summary, then Back Up Now, with the “Encrypt local backup” checkbox and its password directly underneath.

And once the automatic backup is on, three conditions decide whether it ever actually runs. All three, together, every night.

That is the answer to the commonest complaint in this whole subject — a phone that says its last backup was weeks ago. Nothing is broken. One of the three has not been true at the same time as the other two, and on a phone that charges wirelessly beside a bed while somebody reads on it, that happens for weeks at a time.

There is a question worth borrowing from the National Cyber Security Centre before choosing between the two, because it separates them more sharply than any feature list: “At any given time, are one or more backups offline?” iCloud never is — which is what makes it convenient, and also why the NCSC has seen incidents in which ransomware “compromised connected cloud storage locations containing backups”. A computer backup on a drive you unplug is offline by default. The same guidance sets out the 3-2-1 rule — “at least 3 copies, on 2 devices, and 1 offsite” — which a phone, a computer backup and iCloud satisfy without buying anything. And it ends where this guide ends: backups “should also be regularly tested to check they work as expected”.

One last piece, because the backup is only half the job and the other half is where people find out what they have. Whether you chose to backup iphone to icloud or to backup iphone to computer, a backup you have never restored is a belief rather than a fact. It does not need testing dramatically; it needs knowing what the job asks for in advance. To restore iphone from backup you need the Apple Account password, the encryption password if you set one — and on that one Apple is blunt: you can set a new password, but “you won’t be able to use previous encrypted backups”, so the backup you were relying on is gone — and enough free space at the other end. All three are easy to have ready and impossible to invent on the day.

The guides below split it four ways: choosing between the two, the storage question that stops most iCloud backups, doing it on a computer properly, and the restore — including the part where a backup exists and cannot be opened.

Not covered here. It will not recommend third-party backup software. The two built-in routes cover this completely, and the paid tools in this category ask for full access to a phone in order to do what a cable already does.

It will not tell you iCloud is enough on its own, or that a computer backup is. They protect against different failures, and the honest answer is both.

And it will not soften the encryption point. Apple states the box is off by default, and a backup made without it does not contain your passwords. What holds instead is simple: the contents of each kind of backup and the encryption categories are Apple’s own wording.