iOS software
Swipe away your touchscreen troubles and rekindle your love of Apple’s mobile devices
by KARIN PETERSEN
Do I need to back up?
QDo I need to back up my iPhone, as it already shares everything in iCloud?
AIt’s a good general rule to back up everything. Assume your iPhone was lost or stolen, or became unusable: ask yourself what you might lose then. If you got a replacement and synced it with your iCloud account, what isn’t shared there? When you last got a new iPhone, you almost certainly synced it with your old one, transferring settings and local data that aren’t kept in iCloud. That’s the data that your backup can safeguard and replace when you most need it. iCloud doesn’t share some of the data specific to apps you’ve downloaded. That can include timelines and other information from social media and messaging apps, and information for games. If you back up your Apple Watch to your iPhone, then those backups aren’t shared in iCloud either, and need their own backup.