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For those who back your iPhones up to iCloud, what do you back up?

T

terzinator

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Feb 27, 2011
294
1
The free iCloud service is 5GB... way too small to back up the whole phone. But I'm not planning to get the paid service. (I have plenty of other backup scenarios, including Time Machine, and I also back up my phone to my computer, and I have iTunes Match, so it's just another redundancy...)

So, what do you back up? Just the settings?

Not sure it's really necessary. (Although, it might have been nice when I got my replacement 4S recently... I could have then restored from the iCloud backup at the Apple Store. Even if I didn't have all my apps backed up, at least I'd have my address book, etc...)

But I just restored when I got home, so not really a big deal.

Trying to figure out if it's worth it, and what to back up to it.

(I know there's an iCloud forum, but wondering specifically about backing up the iPhone...)
 
I backup everything. Apps don't use any storage space. All music, videos, books purchased through iTunes don't use any storage. If you use iTunes Match, all your music is stored without any penalty either.

The biggest storage hit comes from your camera roll. However, with photo stream I just transfer photos from photo stream on my MBP into iPhoto and then clean out my camera roll.

As a point if reference, I have about 150 apps on my iphone 5 64GB. I have about 32GB of music and about 130 movies. My iCloud uses about 2.5GB.

If you use iCloud storage for pages, keynote, numbers, you'll probably get less mileage than me.

Most everything that's backed up is just data.
 
CosmoPilot said:
I backup everything. Apps don't use any storage space. All music, videos, books purchased through iTunes don't use any storage. If you use iTunes Match, all your music is stored without any penalty either.

The biggest storage hit comes from your camera roll. However, with photo stream I just transfer photos from photo stream on my MBP into iPhoto and then clean out my camera roll.

As a point if reference, I have about 150 apps on my iphone 5 64GB. I have about 32GB of music and about 130 movies. My iCloud uses about 2.5GB.

If you use iCloud storage for pages, keynote, numbers, you'll probably get less mileage than me.

Most everything that's backed up is just data.
Click to expand...
Good to know... Thanks.

I'm guessing it drops from iCloud any photos you clear off your phone, right? (You don't have to clear 'em out of iCloud, I'd assume.)
 
That's correct. iCloud backs up every night when connected to a power source and WiFi available. The photos will be dropped from your iCloud backup during the next backup after you've deleted them.
 
Everything except contacts, calendars and notes. My contacts and calendars are synced with Google so that I can push changes down the line to any of my PowerPC Macs running Entourage 2008. I don't use Mail and I have no Macs capable of utilizing iCloud so in my case there isn't any way to modify contacts or calendars and reflect those changes to my Macs if I use iCloud. Hence Google.

My entire music library is stored on Google Play so if I want to listen from my iPhone I use gMusic and stream. consequently that's over 13GB that is NOT sitting on my iPhone. If I want immediate music I either used my iPod or my Macs. Now, if I could find a way to do that with video without having to pay a service I'd be ecstatic.

I limit the apps I let use storage. I'm a big Weather app fan, but I don't see a need to let 10+ weather apps store content to iCloud. Same with other apps that I don't really need their data.

For pictures I let iCloud store everything. If I eventually hit a wall all of my pics are auto uploading to Dropbox anyway and most of the important stuff I move off my iPhone. So, should I lose every picture on my iPhone it wouldn't matter as all the important stuff has already been moved.

Even so, I have about 2.8GB of data out of the 5GB allotment. 2.3GB for my iPhone 5 and .5GB from my iPhone 3GS.
 
everything. 5GB is enough for my ipad and iphone

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terzinator said:
The free iCloud service is 5GB... way too small to back up the whole phone. But I'm not planning to get the paid service. (I have plenty of other backup scenarios, including Time Machine, and I also back up my phone to my computer, and I have iTunes Match, so it's just another redundancy...)

So, what do you back up? Just the settings?

Not sure it's really necessary. (Although, it might have been nice when I got my replacement 4S recently... I could have then restored from the iCloud backup at the Apple Store. Even if I didn't have all my apps backed up, at least I'd have my address book, etc...)

But I just restored when I got home, so not really a big deal.

Trying to figure out if it's worth it, and what to back up to it.

(I know there's an iCloud forum, but wondering specifically about backing up the iPhone...)
Click to expand...

Just becasue you have 16GB of data on your phone doesnt mean your icloud backup will be that big if thats what you are thinking. It wont be anywhere near that
 
adam044 said:
everything. 5GB is enough for my ipad and iphone

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Just becasue you have 16GB of data on your phone doesnt mean your icloud backup will be that big if thats what you are thinking. It wont be anywhere near that
Click to expand...
Gotcha. I just did it and it looks to be about 2GB.

It'll be interesting to see how it goes with the 5S (I currently have a 4S)... If I start taking more photos (beyond the "honey, which scent of soap do you want? See pic!"), and if it backs up the photo stream, I could see how you'd get to the limit pretty fast. But we'll cross that bridge when we come to it.

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eyoungren said:
Everything except contacts, calendars and notes. My contacts and calendars are synced with...
Click to expand...

yep, this makes sense for me, too. Mail/Contacts/Calendars are all on my mail server...

What about mail settings, though? Is that stored? (Not a big deal to recreate, but just curious if settings for CONNECTING to my mail accounts are captured.)
 
5GB is plenty for any phone... just do NOT backup the camera roll, but do not rely on photo stream, the pics are not full size and will lack quality... you should download pics off the phone via iphoto or image capture for a mac and any number of utilities (or even manually) on a PC. I can't imaging anyone using POP3 these days for mail... but I suppose if you did that could be a lot of space as well.
 
nikhsub1 said:
5GB is plenty for any phone... just do NOT backup the camera roll, but do not rely on photo stream, the pics are not full size and will lack quality... you should download pics off the phone via iphoto or image capture for a mac and any number of utilities (or even manually) on a PC. I can't imaging anyone using POP3 these days for mail... but I suppose if you did that could be a lot of space as well.
Click to expand...

Photo stream is full size.
 
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