How To Customize Your iPhone iCloud Backup

Most iPhone and iPad users rely on iCloud Backup to keep their data safe, even if they don't realize they are using it. You can customize which apps backup to iCloud if you look in the right place in the Settings app. If you want to stick with iCloud's free storage plan you may need to do this to remain under the limit. You can learn about this and more in the new Guide to iCloud course at https://macmost.com/icloud


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So if you have an iPhone and you're not using iCloud Drive for much there is probably one feature of iCloud Drive you're using and you're probably not even thinking about it. You're using iCloud Backup. iCloud Backup allows you to have you're phone backed up to iCloud and using that 5 GB of free storage space that you get with iCloud.

Now this backup is really important because if you loose you're iPhone or it breaks or something then you can restore to a new iPhone. A lot of people don't even know that this is happening and they're pleasantly surprised when they go to the Apple Store to get a new iPhone and the tech there is able to restore all their stuff. It wasn't that many years ago that if you lost your iPhone or got a new one you were dismayed to find out you lost a lot of things.

So iCloud Backup is great but it's not so great if you find you're going over the 5 GB limit because you're iCloud Backup is too big. You can fix that because you can decide what gets backed up and what doesn't. But it's really hidden. Now on your iPhone if you go into Settings and then you tap on your Apple ID at the top. So it's got your name, Apple ID, iCloud, iTunes, etc. You go into there and then you can see information about your Apple ID including iCloud.

Go into iCloud here. If we scroll down we can see iCloud Backup. We go into that and you can see it should be turned on. Everybody should be using iCloud Backup. There's really no excuse not to backup. It's so important. You've got a Back Up Now button but you don't have any kind of way to customize what's going on there. So how do you customize what gets backed up.

Well, it's not here. It's at the top again. You go to Manage Storage. If you look at Manage Storage you can see it says Backups. This is your iCloud storage here. So you can see I have the 5 GB free plan. I'm using a lot of that for photos. Backups is my next biggest thing. So I go into Backups. It's going to take me into there and it's going to show me, okay it's backing up Documents & Data. Almost 1 GB worth. I actually have it divided between and iPad and an iPhone on this account. So it's only half or a little less than half this iPhone.

If I tap on this iPhone and I go in there and it's going to say Last Backup. That's always good to check to know it's all working. The Size of the backup. The Next Backup Size. In other words I've added things and I've changed things. So what's going to add to the backup next time. Then I see this great list of apps and whether or not they're backing up and how much space they're using. So this is key here because you can really shrink the size of your backup by turning things off.

Now some things you don't want to turn off, right. It's backing up which is great and you want to save all that stuff. But some stuff you don't really care about. Like, for instance, Audible. You know I can always redownload those books. I know it's syncing to Amazon's service there for saving my Settings and things. There's some other things in here. Maybe just some apps that I've experimented with. I don't really care about the data or I know that the data is being saved some other way. I can just turn those off and save that space. So it's something you may want to look at.

So I talk about this and every other aspect of iCloud in my new course, The Guide to iCloud. This is a comprehensive course with 3+ hours of videos all about all the different ways you can use iCloud. How to use it. Where to access all the features. You can read more about it and if you're watching this video just after it came out there's a special introductory price that you can get for the course as well.

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