Backing up your iPhone and Mac so you never lose your photos

Yaw's iPhone slipped out of his shirt pocket into the sea at Labadi. The phone was replaceable. What went with it was his daughter's first two years: the first steps, the naming ceremony, the video of her laughing at a goat. None of it had been backed up, because the phone kept saying "iCloud storage full" and he kept tapping "Not now".

Almost everyone who has lost photos has a version of that story. The fix is not complicated, and it costs far less than the phone. Here is how to set it up once and stop thinking about it.

The idea in one sentence

Keep three copies of anything you cannot replace, on two different kinds of storage, with one copy away from your house.

People call this the 3-2-1 rule. In practice, for most families it means: the photos on your phone, a copy in iCloud, and a copy on an external drive at home. Lose the phone, and iCloud has them. Lose access to your Apple Account, and the drive has them. A fire or burglary takes the drive, and iCloud still has them.

iCloud Photos: the everyday safety net

iCloud Photos keeps your whole library in iCloud and in sync across your iPhone, iPad and Mac. Take a photo in Kumasi, and it is on your Mac in Accra by the evening.

Turn it on in Settings > [your name] > iCloud > Photos. Then choose Optimise iPhone Storage, so the phone keeps small versions and fetches full ones when you open them. This is what frees space on a full phone.

Everyone gets 5GB of iCloud for free, which is nowhere near enough for photos. iCloud+ plans go from 50GB up to 12TB. For a single person, 200GB is often right; a family can share a 2TB plan with Family Sharing. It is the best-value piece of insurance in this article.

iCloud Backup: the rest of the phone

iCloud Photos covers pictures and videos. iCloud Backup covers everything else: settings, app data, messages, the arrangement of your Home Screen. Restore from it on a new iPhone, and it looks like your old one within the hour.

Turn it on in Settings > [your name] > iCloud > iCloud Backup. It runs by itself once a day when the phone is locked, charging and on Wi-Fi. For most people that means overnight, which is also when home Wi-Fi is least busy.

WhatsApp keeps its own backup to iCloud. Set it in WhatsApp under Settings > Chats > Chat Backup, and choose whether to include videos, which can be large.

Keeping it gentle on data

The first iCloud upload is the heavy one. If you have 40GB of photos, that is 40GB of data. Do it on home broadband or office Wi-Fi, never on a mobile bundle. Newer iPhones can back up over 5G if your network allows it; check Settings > [your name] > iCloud > iCloud Backup and leave cellular backup off unless you have an unlimited plan. After the first upload, daily changes are small.

Power cuts in the middle

Dumsor does not damage a backup. An iCloud upload simply pauses and picks up where it left off when power and Wi-Fi return. A Time Machine backup that is interrupted continues next time too. The only thing to avoid is running a big first backup on a laptop battery at 10%; plug in, and if the power goes, let it resume.

Your Mac: Time Machine

Time Machine is built into every Mac. Plug in an external drive, go to System Settings > General > Time Machine, and add it as a backup disk. From then on the Mac keeps hourly backups for the past day, daily backups for the past month and weekly backups before that.

Choose a drive at least twice the size of your Mac's storage. An SSD is faster and survives a knock better than a spinning hard drive. Leave it plugged in at your desk, or plug it in once a week if you carry your laptop around.

Your iPhone to your Mac, by cable

For a copy that does not depend on the internet at all, connect the iPhone to your Mac with its cable, open Finder, select the iPhone in the sidebar, and choose Back up all of the data on your iPhone to this Mac. Tick Encrypt local backup and set a password you will remember; encrypted backups also save passwords and Health data. Time Machine then backs up that backup to the drive. On a Windows PC, the Apple Devices app does the same job.

Before a repair or a new phone

Before any iPhone goes for repair:

1. Run a fresh backup and check the time under iCloud Backup says "just now".
2. Make sure iCloud Photos has finished uploading. The Photos library shows a progress message at the bottom.
3. Know your Apple Account password. You will need it to turn off Find My, which a repair centre asks for, and to restore afterwards.

When changing iPhones, the easiest route is Quick Start: put the new phone next to the old one and it moves everything across directly. Your iCloud backup is the safety net if something goes wrong.

Twenty minutes, once

Set up iCloud Photos, iCloud Backup and one external drive this weekend. Then the worst day with your phone is only a bad day, not a lost two years.