In todays interconnected world managing all your data is quite important. Most of us end up having more than one smart device that we use everyday. As time goes on we will buy a newer version of the device. It is not necessary that we will get a newer version of each smart computer that we own simultaneously. This means that we have to pay special attention to making sure that our data stays up to date on all the devices & that there is no accidental loss of data.

There are various solutions available to users which easily takes care of data management problems commonly faced by multiple users. One of the most common solutions is to make sure that all your data is available on the cloud. I have given a brief overview on the different cloud services available in my previous article.

However, storing information on the cloud is not enough. Some effort still needs to be done on the users end to ensure that the data is there everywhere they want it. In this article I will be talking about managing your data, migrating your data & backing up your data on your iOS devices.

The starting point for this is the iCloud service. It is a free service provided by Apple & is a must for iPhones & iPads.

Through this article I will be referring to the iOS device as iPhone, however, the steps apply to any iOS device. A few settings & options may change depending on the version of the OS on your computer & your mobile device. The steps mentioned below would be applicable for iOS 8. They may be applicable for earlier versions, but all features may not be available.

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Moving your data (migrating) from your old iPhone to your new iPhone

This is a very common situation. Most people have a devices for a few years & place a lot of data on it. Once they purchase a new device getting the same data onto the new device is the challenge. This involves a few steps.

STEP 1

1. Make sure your iCloud service is turned on. By default iCloud provides sync capabilities for the information enumerated below. Note that not all services needn’t be on. But its a good idea to make sure that it is on at the very least for migration purposes.
   1. Contacts
   2. Calendar Events
   3. Reminders
   4. Photos
   5. Notes
   6. Documents for Keynote/Numbers/Pages
   7. Any documents you might have placed in the iCloud Drive (iOS 8 & later).
   8. Passbook
2. Data provided by other services such as Google, Microsoft & any other provider will be taken care of by their respective accounts.
3. Prepare a list of apps that don’t take advantage of the iCloud service or any other cloud based service. Note: Some apps do take advantage of iCloud but need the feature to be turned on explicitly. You may have to back this data up manually. If there are online accounts associated with the app, then make sure you are signed in & that the account offers data retrieval at a later point in time.
4. Take a backup of your phone on your computer using iTunes.

STEP 2:

1. Turn on your new iPhone & follow the screen steps.
2. When asked “if you would like to setup the iPhone as a new phone or not” choose the option to restore from backup (do this only if you plan to restore from a backup taken via iTunes or from iCloud).
3. This will prompt you to connect your iPhone to the computer where you last backed up your old iPhone.
4. Once the restore is complete simply sign in with your Apple ID & start using your new iPhone from where you had left off.
5. All the Apps, songs, movies, books purchased using your Apple ID will be available on your new iPhone. Apps will be available subject to OS Version compatibility.

For those who do not have a computer based backup or don’t have a computer can choose to backup their phone onto iCloud. Note that this will require sufficient free space available on the cloud. When they are prompted to restore users will have to sign in with their Apple ID & restore the backup from there.

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Moving data from your computer to your new iPhone or Moving from another smartphone to iPhone

This is for first time buyers or people switching to the iPhone. No matter which is the case there is one important thing to be done. You have to move your data onto a cloud service which is compatible with iPhone.

From a computer

iCloud is available for iOS Devices, Macs & Windows. So if you are moving your data from Windows onto your iPhone you could consider running iCloud for Windows. Additionally the iCloud service is also accessible from the browser. So you can access many documents across both the platforms.

Apart from this you can also use iTunes for Windows to move your data from the computer to the iPhone.

From another smartphone

This will mean that you will have to use a third party cloud service. Good choices for something like this would be Google Drive or Dropbox. Other services such as Evernote could also be used for the same.

1. On your current device transfer as much content as you can to the cloud service. Note that apps & media purchased on the smartphone may not necessarily be available due to compatibility reasons.
2. On your new iPhone sign in with the same cloud service & pull in all your data.

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Backing up your iPhone/iPad

Backing up data is very important. This is a step missed quite often by many users. A common mistake made is in believing that they can restore all their data from the iCloud whenever they wish. While that is true, iCloud is not meant to act as a backup. You can choose to save your backup on iCloud, but this is simply using the iCloud storage space for holding the backup & is not otherwise accessible.

There are 2 options to backing up your iPhones data. One is to back it up onto your computer using iTunes, the other is to back it up onto iCloud.

Backing up onto iCloud

Pros

• Your backup is immediately available.
• No need to have a separate computer just for this.
• Backup can be restored from any location as long as internet connection is available.

Cons

• A very good internet connection would be required.
• The backup is restricted by the amount of space available on the cloud.

Backing up using iTunes

Pros

• There is no storage limit. Your backup can be very large.
• You can have multiple large backups.
• Optional encryption capability.
• With WiFi, based syncing the backups happen automatically.

Cons

• You have to be physically connected to the computer using cable or WiFi to perform the backup.
• You have to be physically connected to the computer using cable or WiFi to restore the backup.