How Often Should You Back Up Your Phone?

It has probably happened to you before, or at least someone you know. You lose your phone, it's stolen, or it goes kaput. With it goes all your precious photos, videos, and other important content. This is an easily avoidable issue by keeping your phone backed up on your computer or a separate drive. Some also work with companion services like Apple's iCloud or Google Cloud. 

While you know how important it is to back up your phone, you might wonder how often you should do it. While there's no specific right or wrong answer, most experts agree that you should do so at least weekly, depending on how much new data is added to your device. For casual users, weekly or biweekly might suffice. You can get away with monthly if you don't often save much new data to the device. On the other hand, if you take a lot of photos, save a lot of important files, log notes, or anything else that involves potentially important data, you might want to back up your phone daily.  There's no harm in backing up more frequently to avoid data loss, whether it's that video of your toddler's first steps or the audio recording of an important overseas business meeting.

When deciding on a backup schedule, consider how important your data is and how you may lose it. If you travel often, there's a greater chance your device will be lost or stolen. If it's a phone for a child or teen, you might want a safeguard in case they misplace or damage it. If the phone isn't durable or is on its last legs, backing up gives you peace of mind that you have all your data to copy over to a new device.

If you're worried about losing data, daily, automatic cloud backups might be the way to go. Once turned on, this works as long as the phone is plugged in and connected to Wi-Fi. With both Apple iCloud and Android, you can customize what content you back up, choosing only the most important data to conserve space in your account. Note that both iCloud and Google provide limited storage for free, after which you'll have to pay for a subscription. If preferred, you could use one of the other popular cloud storage apps, such as Dropbox or OneDrive. 

If you want to avoid the cloud or don't have access, you can back up your iPhone to a laptop using iTunes on both Mac and Windows devices, or your Android device using file transfer on a Windows PC or Android File Transfer on a Mac. A new Android feature may use Quick Share to back up files to your PC, too, but it's not out yet as of this writing. For physical backup you keep locally, copy important files to a portable hard drive at a desired frequency.

The cloud is the simplest option, and if you want to stick within the free tier, occasionally clean out your phone and your cloud files by removing duplicates, bad photos, or items you no longer need. Whichever method you use, at the very least, light users should back up once a month, casual users should back up weekly or biweekly, and heavy users should set up a daily automatic backup for important files.