I’ve always been a firm believer of running backups your important documents and other data like photos, music, and videos.
Over the years, Apple has done a good job enhancing iCloud to automatically take care of this for you on the iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch. With last night’s little iOS 6.1 upgrade disaster, knowing that I had a recent backup of my iPhone meant that I was only going to have to deal with the reloading my backup and not have to worry about lost photos, text messages, and all the rest.
Here are a few quick steps to make sure you have iCloud backups turned on and how to run an immediate backup if you want to – like just before an iOS upgrade.
Turning on iCloud Backups
Step 1: To get started, tap on Settings from the Home screen.
Step 2: Tap on iCloud on the Settings page.
Step 3: Sign in to your iCloud account if you haven’t already done so.
Step 4: Scroll down to the bottom of the iCloud page, and tap ‘Storage & Backup’.
Step 5: Near the bottom of the page, set the ‘iCloud Backup’ option to ‘ON’.
Step 6: Tap the ‘Back Up Now’ button at the bottom of the page to start a backup immediately.
Bonus Points: At the very bottom of the ‘Storage & Backup’ page, will be a message telling you when the last time a successful iCloud backup was completed.