If you have an iPhone (or iPad), you probably know that you cannot simply plug in your device and copy-paste your files to the computer like you do with an Android device. Apple restricts the access to the files and only the photos are accessible via an USB drive mount. In this article, we will show you how to completely backup an iPhone using iTunes. Alternate methods will be mentioned too.
What is iTunes?
iTunes started out as a media player/manager, but has turned into a complete mobile management application for iOS devices (iPhone + iPad). You can download it from the link in this paragraph.
Is iTunes Available For Windows/Mac/Linux?
For now, iTunes is only available for both Windows and Mac. Unfortunately, iTunes is not available for Linux and we are not sure if it would be available in the near future. So, if you are a Linux user (like I am), you can simply utilize VMware to virtually run Windows and then install iTunes on top of Windows to sync / backup your iPhone.
Steps To Backup iPhone Using iTunes
First of all, you will have to download the iTunes software and successfully install it. Then, follow the steps below.
- Launch iTunes on your Windows / Mac system.
- Plug in your iPhone to the system.
- As soon as you plug in, you will be prompted to “Trust” or “Do Not Trust” the computer you are connected to on your iPhone. Simply, tap on “Trust this Computer“
- Now, head back to the iTunes app on your system and look for the device icon as highlighted in the image below.
- After you click on the specified icon, you’ll be greeted with the summary window as shown in the image below. There are chances that iTunes will automatically start backing up your iPhone. You can either wait for it to complete or cancel it to manually backup your iPhone where you will get a couple of options to choose for your backup.
- Now, simply scroll down and then click on “Back Up Now” in order to proceed to backup your iPhone using iTunes.
- After you click on “Back Up Now“, you will be asked whether to encrypt your iPhone backup or not. If you opt in to encrypt it, you will be able to back up your account passwords, Health & HomeKit data.If you simply want to back up your data excluding the passwords and health app data, you can proceed without choosing to encrypt the iPhone backup.
- So, now after you are done confirming the additional options, the iPhone backup process would start instantly. You can check out the progress of your backup at the top-bottom of iTunes software window.
That’s it! You will have to wait for a couple of minutes for the backup to complete. In my case, it took almost 7 minutes to backup my iPhone with 26 Gigs of data on board without encryption.
Let us know your thoughts in the comments section below. Do you have any problem following the steps mentioned above? Feel free to let us know in the comments below.