Are documents in apps backed up?

Unless the developer of the App has configured their App so that those sorts of "Documents" are not backed up, then they should be included with an iTunes or iCloud backup.

yalag said:

Oh ok I didn't know the developer gets to choose. So I guess this app chose not to backup. It's a video player and the files are video files.

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That would make sense.

Apple doesn't really allow that sort of thing to be backed up. Developers are only supposed to back up content that can't be re-created some other way. Apple assumes that any video content can be redownloaded or resynced by you.

my documents in Numbers and Pages are backed up automatically across all my devices through iCloud. its an option you can turn on or off.

Well, with iCloud they do. You can double check per-app by looking at the iCloud backup settings in your phone where you decide which ones to back up and which ones to not.



Now, obviously that's iCloud, not iTunes, but the iTunes backup should be the same. In fact, I don't think it even has the option to turn stuff off like that, so it should be even more automatic than iCloud is.

yalag said:

I would think that they do but last week I restored my iPhone and none of my documents are there. Not on the device, not in iTunes. So I lost everything. What's going on?

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...so I'm not really sure what happened. Can you find the phone backup on your computer (google can help you) and see what size it is? Does it seem large enough? Maybe try restoring again and make sure to leave the phone plugged in longer? Maybe it got interrupted?

Small White Car said:

Well, with iCloud they do. You can double check per-app by looking at the iCloud backup settings in your phone where you decide which ones to back up and which ones to not.

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It's still dependent on the developer's choices.

Apple's guidelines are quite clear that:

"Critical data is any data that cannot be recreated by your app, such as user documents and other user-generated content."

Generally, any content like music, videos, podcasts, books etc. is not "critical data".

Apple either assumes that the content can be re-downloaded from the App itself (e.g. Books from the Kindle App) or that the user can copy the files back over to their device manually.

With most people having no more than 5GB of Storage for iCloud, the idea of including videos in a backup would be crazy (unless the videos were taken by the user on their device).

Apps released since iOS 5 are expected to work in this way.

These rules are primarily designed to reduce the amount of data that Apple has to store, but most users would not want to be uploading gigabytes of data in a backup either.

Developers can choose to place content into a specific folder (to separate content that IS backed up from content that isn't) or to mark specific files as not requiring backup.

dictoresno said:

my documents in Numbers and Pages are backed up automatically across all my devices through iCloud. its an option you can turn on or off.

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That's a different feature (Documents in the Cloud)

yalag said:

Oh ok I didn't know the developer gets to choose. So I guess this app chose not to backup. It's a video player and the files are video files.

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Which video App is this?

The developer of the video player that I use (GoodPlayer) has a toggle to choose if the files are backed up or not. The default is that they aren't.