Manually backing up your iPhone or iPad, or taking advantage of iCloud automatic backups, is the best way to guarantee that you will be able to get all your data back in the event something goes wrong. Whether you choose to backup via iTunes or iCloud, you might want to delete this backup at some point. Maybe the backup file got corrupted, or maybe you’re running out of storage space on your Mac or in iCloud. Or maybe you have an entirely different reason to delete your iPhone or iPad backup file. Whatever the reason is, we’ve got you covered. In this post, we will learn how to delete an iPhone backup from a Mac and we’ll also see how to delete a backup file from iCloud. Note that for the purpose of this tutorial, we will look into deleting the backup of an iPhone, but the steps are exactly identical if you were to delete an iPad backup file.

how to iphone backup
If you use iTunes instead of iCloud to backup your iPhone or iPad, the backup file will be stored somewhere on your computer. We’re going to see how to delete this file directly from your Mac using iTunes. In the Preferences, navigate to the Devices tab. You will now see a list of all the backup files that have been made on your computer, from all devices synced with your iTunes account. As you can see here, I have a few iPhone backups, all of them dating from last year, including a couple for devices I don’t even use anymore. We definitely want to clean up these backups. To do so, select the backup you want to delete. You can select multiple backups at a time by holding the Command key on your keyboard while selecting different files with the mouse. Click on the Delete Backup button. You will see this popup asking you to confirm to delete the backup. Click Delete to confirm.

The backup file has now been deleted from your computer. At this point, it is gone forever. If you backup your iPhone or iPad in iCloud, you can also easily access these backups and delete them directly from your Mac. Click on the iCloud icon. This will load up your iCloud preferences. Click on the Manage button at the bottom right of the window. This will load up all your iCloud content. Select the Backups tab at the top of the list, which will bring up all the iCloud backups from all your devices linked to your iTunes account. As you can see, I have only iPhone backups made in iCloud. Select the iCloud backup you want to delete. Click the Delete button. A confirmation message will popup. Click Delete to confirm and erase the backup file once for all. You may repeat the process with each backup file you want to delete. Storage & iCloud Storage, and select Manage Storage under the iCloud section. At the top, you will see all your iOS backups. Select the backup you want to delete. A popup will show up, asking if you want to turn off backup and delete all backup data for the device. Select Turn Off & Delete. The backup will be deleted but iCloud backup will be turned off too. Cloud, and turn iCloud Backup on. I hope you will find this guide useful. If you have any question, please feel free to ask in the comment section below.

Another easy way to back up your iPhone photos is through AirDrop. To enable Bluetooth on your phone, scroll up to open the Control Center and hit the Bluetooth icon. Of course, if you don’t have a Mac it’s still easy enough to back up your photos to your Windows computer. Select ‘Review, organise and group items to import’ if you’re transferring your photos to your PC for the first time. Select the photos you want to upload to your PC and then click ‘Continue’. There is a wide range of cloud storage solutions that can back up your iPhone photos for you instantly, without you having to do anything beyond downloading the cloud storage app itself. Here are the three most popular solutions. Apple’s own iCloud is the obvious choice for backing up your photos. Once you activate iCloud, any photos or videos you take will be instantly uploaded to the iCloud Photo Library which can then be accessed from any Apple device. GB storage is available on Dropbox when you first create an account and it’s simple to set up automatic photo backups on the iPhone. Tap on Camera Upload and toggle it on. Google Drive is the other most popular cloud storage solution. Google Drive’s free tier also comes with 15GB of storage - a lot more than Dropbox.

But I had an iTunes backup. I thought of using iTunes to restore, but it always asked me to connect my device. I just want to get access to the messages on my lost iPhone. How can I restore iPhone messages, If you unfortunately lost your iPhone, there’s still a chance for you to retrieve messages on your lost iPhone as long as you have ever synced or backed up your iPhone using iTunes. Since iTunes will automatically backup your iPhone every time you sync data with it, the messages, photos, videos, contacts, etc. will also be backed up to local computer. But the iTunes backup is a SQLite database file that can't be accessed or previewed. That is to say, you can't directly take any single data out of iTunes backup. To restore iPhone messages in iTunes backup, you'll have to use third-party software, like an iPhone backup extractor. With the powerful iPhone SMS extractor, you can easily find back messages on lost iPhone/iPad/iPod touch by extracting previous iPhone backup. After running the iPhone SMS extractor, click “Recover from iTunes Backup” mode to scan the iTunes backup stored on your computer. Then all the iTunes backup of different iDevices will be listed, select the backup of your iPhone and click “Scan” to scan the files in the iPhone backup. After quick scan, all of your backup files of different iDevices will be displayed in 12 types on the left of the software interface. If you want to extract messages from iPhone backup, you can click the "Messages" category to preview detailed items of the messages before you recover them. Then click "Recover" button to continue. In the pop-up “Recover Files” window, choose a computer folder to save the messages to be output, and click “Go” to start to extract messages from iPhone backup.