How to Backup Your iPhone

iPhones are no doubt the latest fad in technology, but if you lose your iPhone it frequently disrupts your life more than the actual monetary loss of the phone. Losing all your music, saved videos, contacts and notes can be quite unnerving for people who very much depend on their iPhone for day to day contacts and entertainment. Music, applications, videos, photos, e mail account settings, podcasts, ringtones, notes, contacts, bookmarks and calendars can all be copied on to your computer from an iPhone through iTunes. This facility creates a complete backup of information on the iPhone. Once you have this backup you can use this stored information to restore data on your iPhone or even transfer it to another device.

iTunes is a media player application that is use to organize all music and video files that are in digital form. It can also manage the content on iPod media players as well as the iPhone. iTunes will keep only one backup for each device which it has created during the sync process. So if you want to go back in time and access data that you had synced previously, you would need to have saved this previous data on any other backup device that you have. Even if you restore the iPhone and set up as a newer device, iTunes will automatically create a new blank backup and delete previously stored data. The information stored on your computer by iTunes can be encrypted for security reasons. This needs a password if the information has to be retrieved. There is no system to recover your password if you do forget it, and this may result in losing all your data. So using the encryption facility has to be exercised with care. The location of the folder that has your backup data will depend on your computer’s operating system, and this should be periodically included in any data backup routine that you have, as iTunes will save only one backup per iPhone. There are certain fixed places where the backup file will be placed depending on whether you are using a Mac or the Windows XP or Windows Vista on your computer.