Tonight I learned that my own sister doesn’t backup her iPhone.
My own sister.
You hear about this thing happening in other families, but you never think that it’ll be someone you know, especially someone in your own family.
I mean, really. She was brought up better than this.
Fortunately her contacts (which is what she was calling me about, because they were mostly missing on her iPhone) were current on iCloud.com, so we were able to get them back on her iPhone.
Then I told her I wasn’t hanging up until she turned on iCloud backup, and that when it eventually told her that she was out of storage, she’d have to pay $12/year to keep it going.
I have a yearly alert to send Mom a $36 gift card to renew her iCloud storage; I am positive otherwise she’d stop backups and eventually lose all her photos.
Most of my dad’s photos are of his finger, so I don’t bother.
I did buy my sister a hard drive and set up Time Machine on it, after her second catastrophic failure (I learned about some pretty impressive file recovery software back then), with photos going to Google. I forced my parents to store their files in the cloud, so at least that’s safe-ish (better to have an automatic sync than to rely on elderly relatives backing up).
Most of the problems I have encountered with helping my family and relatives. No matter which solution you create whether it’s simple as turning it on for them or complicated as getting them set them to backup with an external drive…the point of failure is them.
By that I mean, you set them up with iCloud or Google, but they notoriously forget to adjust their settings each time they upgrade. Or they forget to use it, or they forget about the gift card that you sent them to renew again, or, or, and the list continues.
My fellow MPUers, we are damned if we do, and damned if we don’t it. Such is our fate. This is the burden we carry. Lol
I don’t backup my phone (it’s an Android, but that doesn’t make a difference in this case) and iPad either. There’s really no need for that. All important data is already synced from other sources. And they - of course! - get meticulously backed up.
All I need to do if something goes wrong or if I get a new phone, is reinstall the apps and setup the sync sources (e.g. IMAP servers).
The only thing I would loose - and which happened before - is my WhatsApp history. Which is really not that big of a thing and actually better then the alternative: having automatic backups to Google Drive.
@tjluoma had me smiling when reading his original post, but @Timo’s (friendly) retort had me chuckling heartily… Thanks for the pleasant start to the day, you two!
I have been able to get the family to back up their phones to iCloud and photos to Google Photos but that is where it ends.
Hard drives given to my kids for Time Machine backups only have the initial backup I did, they have not been plugged in again. Also had a 1Password Family account but no one would use it.
You need to remember that iCloud backups are not encrypted. If you are happy with that fine. The iPhone is encrypted and local backups on the Mac are, but the iCloud backups are not end to end encrypted.
tjlouma, my wife, my brother and lots of my friends don’t back up their devices too. They think I am exception. I guess there are lots of them in the same boat.
My wife & I are the only Mac users in our families so not much we can do helping them with backups. Haven’t supported Windows for years and don’t want to so they are on their own. I may suggest they do certain things but they are adults and can make their own decisions.
On my parents iPhones I set iCloud up and they are fine with it. My sister I found out never used iCloud cause she is concerned about big brother watching. Then all of a sudden she lost her phone and lost some really important photos and now she uses iCloud. I always told her just use it for contacts and photos, she never would but now she does.
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