This has probably happened to you, or at least to someone you know. You lose your phone, it is stolen or it becomes kaput. With it, all your precious photos, videos and other important content. This is an easily avoidable problem by keeping your phone backed up to your computer or a separate drive. Some also work with additional services like Apple iCloud or Google Cloud.
Even though you know how important it is to back up your phone, you may be wondering how often you should do it. While there’s no right or wrong answer, most experts agree that you should do this at least once a week, depending on how much new data is added to your device. For occasional users, a weekly or biweekly frequency may be sufficient. You can get away with monthly if you don’t save a lot of new data to the device often. On the other hand, if you take a lot of photos, save a lot of important files, journal notes, or anything else involving potentially important data, you may want to back up your phone daily. There’s no harm in backing up more frequently to avoid data loss, whether it’s the video of your little one’s first steps or the audio recording of an important business meeting abroad.
When deciding on a backup schedule, consider how important your data is and how likely you are to lose it. If you travel often, your device is more likely to be lost or stolen. If it’s a phone for a child or teenager, you may want protection in case they misplace or damage it. If the phone isn’t durable or is on its last legs, backing up gives you peace of mind knowing you have all your data to copy to a new device.
What options do you have for phone backups?
If you’re worried about losing data, daily, automatic cloud backups could be the solution. Once turned on, it works as long as the phone is plugged in and connected to Wi-Fi. With Apple iCloud and Android, you can customize the content you back up, choosing only the most important data to save space on your account. Note that iCloud and Google offer limited storage for free, after which you will need to pay a subscription. If you prefer, you can use one of the other popular cloud storage apps, such as Dropbox or OneDrive.
If you want to avoid the cloud or don’t have access to it, you can back up your iPhone to a laptop using iTunes on Mac and Windows devices, or to your Android device using File Transfer on a Windows PC or Android File Transfer on a Mac. A new Android feature can also use Quick Share to back up files to your PC, but it’s not yet available as of this writing. For a physical backup that you keep locally, copy important files to a portable hard drive at the desired frequency.
The cloud is the easiest option, and if you want to keep the free tier, occasionally clean up your phone and cloud files by removing duplicates, bad photos, or items you no longer need. Regardless of which method you use, light users should at least backup once a month, occasional users should backup weekly or biweekly, and heavy users should set up a daily automatic backup for important files.