I was in London yesterday and one of my jobs was to sort out a tangled mess that was someone’s iPhone backup. These days you get to choose whether to backup your iPhone or iPad to your computer via iTunes, or to iCloud. Whichever method you use has its pros and cons, but we found a definite disadvantage of backing up to iCloud which resulted in the backup being of limited use, and several months’ worth of text messages and notes disappearing never to return. Many photos would have gone the same way had my client not been in the habit of regularly copying them into iPhoto on her computer.
The situation was this: My client had noticed some Calendar data had been disappearing. This turned out to be a problem with her work’s Microsoft Exchange email server and nothing to do with her phone at all, but not knowing this she plugged her phone into iTunes and restored the last available backup from her computer. Unfortunately she had forgotten that she had some months ago switched her backup to iCloud, so the iTunes backup she restored was hopelessly out of date. All her data since that date had been erased. Had she at that point restored her iCloud backup she would have been fine. Unfortunately she was just going on a business trip and had no time to go through this process for a few days, by which time it was too late.
Too late to restore a backup? Well, yes. I will explain.
The thinking behind iCloud backup is this: Backing up through iTunes is easy enough – just plug it in and off it goes – but what if you are away from your Mac for a few days? If you go on holiday, that’s a number of days when your iPhone isn’t being backed up and your data is vulnerable.
With iCloud backups however, this problem won’t occur. As long as you have a data or wifi connection your iPhone is backed up every day without your having to think about it. You can go away secure in the knowledge that your stuff is safe should the worst happen and your phone fall in the sea, off a cliff, into the hands of a dastardly pickpocket, or whatever.
Sadly, what may not be obvious until it’s to late is that when backing up to iCloud, Apple only keeps the last three backups. This unfortunately hobbles what would otherwise be a great system. If your iPhone backs itself up once a day you effectively have to restore your missing data within three days or it is gone forever.
By contrast, iTunes only keeps the single, latest backup of each device it is syncing with. If you go into the iTunes menu -> Preferences -> Devices, you can see the device name and the date of the last backup there. However (and this is the important bit) if you have Time Machine running, you effectively have an archive of backups stretching back in time. The backup itself is a folder of encrypted files in your home folder. You can find it in ~/Library/Application Support/Mobile Sync/Backup/ (for those new to the tilde symbol ~ it means your own home folder). Go to this folder, enter Time Machine, and you will see the archive of backups stretching back in time (and CGI space). Simply select one from just before the date your stuff went missing and hit restore. Now this is the last backup iTunes knows about and you can restore it to your device.
OK, I appreciate this is a bit cumbersome, but the point is that it’s possible to restore your data from any point in time, as far back as your Time Machine archive allows. iCloud backup has no such ability. Once you have had three backups — and with auto backups once a day, that may be as short as two days — that’s your lot.
So what it comes down to is this: I am switching off iCloud backups and will only turn them on if I know I’m going to be away from my Mac for a few days. The rest of the time my iPhone will backup in iTunes, and those backups will themselves be archived with the rest of my Mac’s data by Time Machine. We all hope that we will never need our backups, but if we ever do it is good to know they are there ready to use.
