backup iphone to cloud
With the ever-increasing over reliance on smartphones, one of the biggest worry is storing data and creating backup of files and data. It’s no surprise that cloud storage has become extremely popular. It helps storing files and apps securely. Google makes it easy to backup files and phone settings directly from the web under common account settings. Apple, on the other hand, has kept managing backup of each device separate and simple.

With 5GB of free iCloud storage available to a user, it can be easy to be carried away with the contents of your iOS device without knowing how much space it takes up on the cloud. We show you how to manage your iCloud backup and to manage your cloud storage across all your iOS devices.

Open the 'Settings' apps and head over to your account settings at the top. In iOS 10, Apple has simplified managing everything related to your Apple accounts under one unified section. Select the 'iCloud' tab. At the top, you can see the bifurcation of the space used in the cloud storage according to the type of files.

The yellow bar indicates the amount of space your apps take to backup their data. If the image is any indication, the iPhone 8 will indeed be sporting nothing but the screen at the front. Diving in into the bifurcations, you will see total space available in iCloud and the amount of space taken up.

At the end, is the option to 'Manage your storage'. Upon selecting this option, the list of iOS devices which are backed up to iCloud will be listed. In this case, you can see that we have an iPad Mini listed. Below that is additional data and documents from third-party apps and games which save game logs to the cloud.

Even after you uninstall the game from your iOS device, the game progress is always saved in the cloud storage while seamlessly working with Game Centre. Select the device whose backup you wish to manage. The iPad has been actively saving all of the data from every app that is installed on the device. You can disable backups for apps from the list individually and save your iCloud space for pictures.

That's pretty much impossible to beat, and you can get the Google Photos app for a wide variety of devices. Here's our step-by-step guide to using Google Photos to back up your photos and videos. For the other stuff stored on your mobile, such as contacts, notes and more, use the options available on the device.

For iPhones, iCloud is perfectly good, and 5GB should be enough free space, while on Android, your stuff is automatically backed up to Google (assuming you opt in). Read our How to backup Android and How to backup an iPhone guides for more details. We'll admit there's no one-button solution for backing up all your devices at once, and that no form of backup is guaranteed for life.

Let's say you backup all your photos to writable DVDs (not really necessary these days, but something you might have done in the past). It's not going to be long before all the DVD drives are gone (few laptops have them any more), and there's no way to get the photos off those discs. The point is: it's crucial to keep up with the times and make sure your files are moved off any device or platform that may not be accessible for much longer.

Another important point to consider is file versions. If you're modifying a file because you're working on it and developing it, it's useful to be able to return to previous versions. Some backup software supports versioning, as do some online backup and cloud storage services, including Dropbox. If you're using software to backup your entire PC, be aware of the difference between incremental and full backups. Because only a subset of files changes between backups, there's no need to regularly backup all 500GB, say.