iPhone backup

[MaryMorph]

How do you back up your iPhone? My husband's wifi died yesterday on our phone, and we ended up being given a new phone at the Apple store due to a faulty chip.

We have been very bad about backing it up. He never went through the whole process for iCloud, and has only hooked it up to iTunes once when we synched it for his music. Luckily, the guy at the store told us to go home and back it up before he tried to fix it, so everything was saved.

I know that iCloud saves pictures, videos, etc, but what about the contact list and stuff? When I switch iCloud on, it says it will no longer automatically sync w/ our PC when plugged into iTunes. Can I manually do it somehow so that I can have the comfort of both backups?

Thanks for helping out an apple newbie!

mary jo

[Robyn1007]

Syncing it with iTunes is what backs it up.

[DanaSD]

You can change your icloud settings on your iphone to set what you want backed up. The free storage is limited but you can buy additional space.

I manually back up my photos on my computer (not my itunes sync)

[RiverFarm]

Dana, how do you back up photos without iTunes? I have mine in a special folder on my desktop, but I still use iTunes to back them up or add to or change them.

[DanaSD]

Just like any external drive. Go to my computer and click in iPhone. Copy or cut the photos and paste onto your hard drive

[RiverFarm]

Different for me since I have a Mac. Probably the theory's the same, though.

[amarante]

Interesting because my iphone backs up photos to iphoto. When I hook the phone up through USB it synchs to iphoto in the same way that my camera does when I hook my ordinary digital camera. IPhoto recognizes the camera (or the iphone) and then asks me if I want to delete or just synch.

The apps, music, contacts synch through itunes - at least on Mac computers. I assume this would also be true with PC's.

What is true is that if you have iphone with the newest 5 iOS, you can't synch it to your Mac unless your Mac has the Lion OS. I don't know if this is true in terms of what Windows system you need for full compatibility.

I am finally taking the plunge in terms of upgrading to Lion and OS 5 for my iphone as I have some applications that will no longer work on Lion. I can live without Word but I don't know how I will function without Snood.

[RiverFarm]

My iPhone and iPad both trigger iPhoto's launch when I plug them in, but I just close out of it and then go to iTunes, which is also automatically opened then. I asked an Apple tech support guy what I could do to stop iPhoto from launching when I plug in my other devices, and his only suggestion was to disable the feature where programs were automatically opened when the devices were attached via USB cable. Since that would also mean that iTunes wouldn't open, I told him that wasn't a good solution.

Another thing that I find really frustrating is that since OS 5, the lyrics I so carefully entered for my songs no longer display on the iPad. They're there on the iPod and iPhone with the same OS, and tech support has told me it's a glitch and will be fixed, but several updates have come and gone with no change in that problem!

So far I have been able to sync the iPad and iPhone to my Mac without any problems, even though I'm still on Leopard. I have the iPhone 4s, and have already upgraded the OS once.

[amarante]

My iPhone and iPad both trigger iPhoto's launch when I plug them in, but I just close out of it and then go to iTunes, which is also automatically opened then. I asked an Apple tech support guy what I could do to stop iPhoto from launching when I plug in my other devices, and his only suggestion was to disable the feature where programs were automatically opened when the devices were attached via USB cable. Since that would also mean that iTunes wouldn't open, I told him that wasn't a good solution.

Another thing that I find really frustrating is that since OS 5, the lyrics I so carefully entered for my songs no longer display on the iPad. They're there on the iPod and iPhone with the same OS, and tech support has told me it's a glitch and will be fixed, but several updates have come and gone with no change in that problem!

So far I have been able to sync the iPad and iPhone to my Mac without any problems, even though I'm still on Leopard. I have the iPhone 4s, and have already upgraded the OS once.

I don't understand why you don't want iphoto to open when you synch iphone to the computer. All of my photos are stored on my computer and I find it significantly easier to sort them and utilize them from the computer. Storing on the iphone is really "dumb" storage because there really isn't that much one can do with the photos except show them to people on a tiny screen. It's hard to edit; hard to categorize in a meaningful manner and certainly one wouldn't want to keep year's worth of photos on them.

It's the reason why the iphoto/itunes open by default and can't be overridden by users since the overwhelming majority of people would want to download photos to their iphoto database - or at least be given the opportunity.

iphoto and itunes are always open on my computer so there isn't really any issue of synching up when I attach the iphone.

[RiverFarm]

I have a Nikon D70 that I use for photos. I don't take them with my iPhone or iPad, so I don't need iPhoto to be open when I sync those devices. And I don't keep iPhoto or iTunes open because they clutter up my desktop or dock. iPhoto/iTunes open-by-default can be overridden, but then neither opens and I do want iTunes to launch.

Sorry for hijacking this thread, MaryMorph!

[Miss Giggles]

I've been using icloud

[amarante]

I have a Nikon D70 that I use for photos. I don't take them with my iPhone or iPad, so I don't need iPhoto to be open when I sync those devices. And I don't keep iPhoto or iTunes open because they clutter up my desktop or dock. iPhoto/iTunes open-by-default can be overridden, but then neither opens and I do want iTunes to launch.

Sorry for hijacking this thread, MaryMorph!

Not to hijack the thread but that's the good and bad thing about Steve Jobs' business philosophy. On the one hand, by controlling the hardware and the software, he creates what is for most people the most user friendly interface since everything plays well together.

However, it assumes that most people want to use it in a certain way and they don't want people mucking too much under the hood to minimize glitches and corruption of the system.

For most people the inability to not have iphoto synch with the iphone along with itunes wouldn't be a problem.

It's still not really much of a problem though since the synching takes place in the background anyway. I have a separate camera but I always loaded the pictures into iphoto because the database was good and it interfaced well with stuff I did with my photos - mail, mobile me, iweb.

If I really wanted to do some intensive graphics stuff, I would just take the photo from iphoto into whatever application I wanted - i.e. photoshop. My scanner also inputs to iphoto as the easiest way to track the few things I now scan.

[RiverFarm]

Missed this response, Amarante! My computer is slowing down - it probably needs some maintenance - and along with Time Machine which seems to slow things down even more when it does its hourly backups, having iPhoto launch whenever I plug in my iPhone or iPad means that it takes longer to get to the iTunes window and do whatever it is I have in mind. That's why it's annoying.

[MaryMorph]

Thanks for the info everyone, and no worries about the hijack!