This used to work great and is still my preferred method of back up, however for at least the past year it has been extremely unreliable. I have to manually load iTunes on my computer and initiate a back up from there because it never happens automatically anymore. And there’s no way to manually start the Wi-Fi backup from my iPhone anymore (that was removed in iOS 13). Maybe it’s more reliable if you use a Mac instead of a PC, but at this point I get a full backup maybe once a month, and often end up plugging in via USB cable in order to even get that.
(to clarify, my desktop PC is always turned on and connected to the network, so most of the other complaints in this thread about it not working with low battery laptops or whatever don’t apply in my scenario. Even in my ideal-case scenario it still barely works)
Worth mentioning iMazing by DigiDNA fixes a LOT of the issues around Apple's poor implementation of iOS <-> PC/Mac support. You can use it to schedule automatic wireless local backups, among other things.
It's also flakey as hell (just looked and my latest backup is over 3 weeks old), and relies on having a computer plugged into power at the same time as your iPhone, with enough free space.
I've tried getting my family to use it (mainly because they didn't want to pay for iCloud storage), before giving up and just paying their storage for them.
> and relies on having a computer plugged into power at the same time as your iPhone, with enough free space.
I mean... yes? How else would they do it? Data transfer is power-intensive, and encryption is also power-intensive. Imagine having only 10% battery on your laptop while you're working at a coffee shop or something and suddenly it drops to 5% because it's started a backup.
Sure, the majority of the time it'd probably work out fine, but Apple's UX philosophy is to simply remove undesirable states from the equation by sufficiently limiting users' options. This is exactly the kind of behavior I would expect from this feature.
It was the primary reason I gave up trying to make it work for my family - none of them regularly leave their laptop plugged in overnight, so there was rarely a time when both laptop and phone were charging at the same time.
It's a command line suite for Mac, Linux, and Windows that interfaces with your iPhone through it's native protocols, including for encrypted local backups.
I’m familiar with this suite. It’s fantastic but at the same time it is often broken with a new iOS release. Apple seems to have no interest in maintaining compatibility. Recently I needed to copy some MP3s to my phone. I’ve done this before with my laptop with success. But that day it did not work. And neither did my Linux desktop. I ended up listening to the audiobook (a free audio book from Cory Doctorow) by pairing my laptop with my cars Bluetooth and playing from my laptop. Cumbersome.
I’ve also had instanced where the latest version of that library supposedly works, but it’s dependent on another library that hasn’t hit Debian mainline yet. So I’ve had to wait months just to get a version that works even though it was released much earlier.
Apple EULA used to (still does?) prohibit virtualization of macOS on non-Apple hardware, so this setup could get flaky (need to patch around new hardware detection mechanisms when upgrading the OS).
You want me to pay for a Windows license to run a Windows VM on Linux, all just so I can back up an iPhone? I don't have to do any of this crap with an Android phone.
And do you believe that running Windows in a virtual machine prevents Microsoft from getting the telemetry data and who knows what else? While you're right that running Android does expose (some of) your data to advertisers, with Windows, we're not even sure what exactly is leaving your machine the last time I checked.
Or are you suggesting that an average Linux user who wants to back up their iPhone needs to buy and install Windows in a VM, and then is further expected to tinker with ingress/egress network rules to make sure no data is being sent over to Microsoft? I'd say that's a tall order.
It's encrypted with a password you type on the computer, but is stored on the phone. Annoyingly, if you lose the password, the only way to change it (even just for future backups) is resetting all settings on the phone.
Why do people care about phone backups anymore? I don't think I have any apps that don't store everything in the cloud. There's nothing of value that's only on my phone. I could toss it in the bin and set up a new one now and not lose anything.
iPhone backups are only one snapshot and done semi-frequently so unless you notice the corruption very quickly, it's going to 'backup' that corruption too.
I said don't have the primary store of your content to be on your phone and don't backup your phone.
The reason for this is that if you lose your phone, everything is lost since you last backed up.
Instead, store have the primary store of your content to be in the cloud and backup your cloud.
The reason for this is that if you lose your phone, it's irrelevant, just get a new phone and re-install your cloud apps. Now you don't need to worry about backing up your phone ever.
The only failure mode is if your phone has not had a signal to upload new content to the cloud in the last few minutes. Well guess what you probably also haven't backed up your phone in that time either if that's what you were doing.
This is why I don’t use iCloud. I don’t think the benefit is worth making my phone subject to search. But when I lost my phone, I was a little disappointed to lose some of the photos I had never moved. A local backup with zero-effort automation does sound promising, if it’s secure.
Right, so don't backup your phone, on iCloud or anywhere else. Use another cloud service to store your files and only sync to your phone, don't back it up.
I didn't say syncing was a backup. That's the opposite of what I'm saying.
I'm saying that my phone becomes the synced copy. The cloud is the canonical version (backed up separately elsewhere) and my phone becomes a device I can lose or break and not worry about anything so I don't need to back it up. As soon as I create any content on my phone I upload it to the cloud.
Take my phone from my hand at any moment and as long as I've had signal in the last few minutes I've lost nothing.
I asked about why people care about backing up their phone. My point is the data should not live on the phone. It should live somewhere more durable, and that durable store should then be backed up.
It’s not only way more friction than iCloud, but you’d be surprised how many people nowadays don’t even own a PC or Mac.
In my wife’s family 60% of people only have phones, tablets and smart TVs. They use laptops/desktops only at work.
It's a shame, but I don't see how this is a knock against Apple. They offer a basic service to backup your device on their infrastructure. If you want better/more you have to provide the infrastructure yourself, and they support several common permutations of suitable infrastructure. I think that's reasonable.
On a daily basis there’s no more friction than iCloud. My phone backs up to my computer over WiFi once a day when it gets plugged in for charging. I don’t ever think about it—it just happens.
The other thing that’s a bit of a problem as I discovered is it doesn’t seem as if there’s any documented way (and I’m wary of undocumented workarounds) to have this backup anywhere but your boot drive. Especially with several OS X devices this can be a bit of a problem if you have an older undersized SSD. I was getting critically low on space and it turned out a huge amount was these backups.
Precisely my problem -- with all the household devices, we've outgrown the boot drive's ability to locally back them up. This is despite the fact that all itunes (or whatever it's called now) media is stored on a NAS and accessed through iTunes seamlessly.
I suppose I could mount a network drive / nfs share at the location iTunes believes is local ...
> I believe even encrypted backups can be cracked.
If anything, they're more prone to being cracked, since an attacker can load the backup onto a very fast system and run custom software which can run many permutations of keys against the backup to try to unlock it. With actual hardware, they're limited by having to manually enter the key in most cases plus any hardware or OS features which would notice that the user has entered too many incorrect passwords and lock down the device further.
On the other hand, if the computer that your backup has been backed up to is itself reasonably locked down, that might be an acceptable trade-off; they can't try to crack a backup they can't access in the first place.
Turn off iCloud and do local encrypted backups to your PC or Mac.
This works over your wifi network (if you prefer wireless charging at home) or via a cable connection.