If you’ve ever experienced a smartphone or tablet malfunction, you’ll know that sometimes your device can be wiped clean of contacts, messages, photos and other vital data in the process of getting it restarted.
If that was your only record of the contents, the result could be catastrophic – thousands of precious photos, contacts and stored information lost.
You might be getting the prompts: ‘you have not backed up this device for two weeks, three weeks’ and so on. But if you’ve ignored them …
Here is a step-by-step guide to saving or ‘backing up’ your devices to your computer to ensure there is a record of your valuable content.
- Click and open iTunes from your desktop.
- Plug your iPhone or iPad into the side of your computer that has the charger chord.
- If a message asks you to ‘Trust This Computer’ or enter a password, follow the onscreen steps. If you have forgotten your password, Apple support can help.
- When connected, it will display your device in the top left-hand corner (i.e. John’s iPhone 5 – if you have named it).
- Select the device after it appears in the corner. It will bring up a large screen entitled ‘Backups’.
- From this, select to back up to ‘This Computer’ or ‘iCloud’.
NOTE: iCloud stores your data in a server that can be accessed by you at any time on any device (such as an iPad).
- On the right of this is the prompt, ‘Manually Back Up and Restore’ where you can select ‘Back Up Now’.
- Below this, select ‘Done’ and let the restoring/back up begin. This may take some time.
- Do not remove your device until the back up is complete.
- When the process ends, you can see if the backup finished successfully on the Summary screen in iTunes. Just look under Latest Backup to find the date and time.
Are you an Android user? You can follow this back-up guide.
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