How to Back up Your Cell Phone

You just got a brand new phone, and you want to sell your old one. You can’t do that, however, while it still has your crucial personal information on it, so you need to wipe that old phone.

How do you make sure you don’t lose all that important information, though — your contacts, calendar, photos, videos, notes and more? You’ll want to make a cell phone backup. In fact, even if you’re not ready to get a new phone yet, it’s a good idea to make a cell phone backup. You never know when your cell phone is going to get lost, stolen or fall into a sewer. But how do you back up a phone? Never fear. Here’s your complete backup cell phone guide, whether you have an Android phone or an iPhone. Let’s look at iPhone first.

How to Back up Your iPhone

To back up your iPhone, first decide if you want to do the backup of your phone to a computer, which you can do using iTunes or the cloud, in which case iCloud is your method of choice. To back up to iTunes, connect your device to your computer and open up iTunes. Put in your passcode and tell your iPhone to “Trust This Computer.” When your iPhone shows up in iTunes, select it. Then simply click “Back Up Now.” Your computer should show the device being backed up. When it’s complete, you’ll find your backup under iTunes Preferences>Devices with a timestamp next to the device name.

If iCloud is your preference, make sure to connect your device to Wi-Fi network and click on “Settings.” Under Settings, select “iCloud.” Scroll down, tap iCloud and switch iCloud Backup to “on” — if it’s not on already. Then hit
“Backup Now.” This should activate the backup cell phone process. To make sure your cell phone backup is complete, check under Settings>iCloud>Storage>Manage Storage and tap your device on the screen to see the backup. If iCloud Backup is enabled, your iPhone will back itself up daily.

How to Back up Your Android Phone

Making a cell phone backup with an Android phone isn’t quite as simple, but with Google’s help, you can get it done. Go to Settings>Privacy and check off “Automatic Restore” and “Back Up My Settings,” if both boxes are not already checked. Then go to Settings>Accounts and Sync, open your Gmail Account and check off everything — contacts, calendar, e-mail, etc. This will allow you to download all your stuff to your new Android phone using the same Google Account.

How to Back up Photos

Note that you will still have to back up your photos manually. There are a number of cloud services you can employ to automatically backup your photos, which you can then download to your new phone if you so desire. Alternatively, you can do a photo backup of your phone to the computer. Just connect your device to your computer and simply drag your photos from your device folder to a folder on your laptop or desktop.