It turns out that, perhaps in the spirit of “breaking the cord” or perhaps just out of laziness, the user had never synced or otherwise backed up her iPhone to her Mac. All updates and downloads had been handled directly from the iPhone itself. Unfortunately, the person had also never backed up her iPhone to iCloud. She never even enabled Photo Stream. At this point, I break the bad news: “There is no sure way to recover your missing data; in fact, your stuff is most likely gone for good.”
Given how many people fail to back up their Macs, I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that such failures extend to iOS devices. But I remain surprised. At least with Macs, there is the “excuse” that local backing up requires the purchase of additional hardware, typically an external drive at least as large as the Mac’s drive.
With an iPhone or iPad, there isn’t even this fig leaf of an excuse. Via iTunes, you can locally back up your iOS device to your Mac. If you’d rather “break the cord” or don’t own a Mac, you can backup to iCloud instead. Both methods are so easy to do that they require just about no effort at all. For those of you who are members of the “never backed up” club, allow me to demonstrate exactly how simple it is:
iTunes Backup
Launch iTunes on your Mac. Connect your iOS device to your Mac via a USB cable. Select your iOS device from iTunes’ Devices list. And click the Sync button. That’s it. Just remember to do this regularly, so you always have a recent backup.
Still not simple enough? No problem. The Summary screen for your iPhone in iTunes should include an option to “Automatically sync when this iPhone is connected.” With this enabled, you don’t even have to launch iTunes or click the Sync button. Just connect your iOS device to your Mac and the rest is handled automatically.
In addition to backing up your iOS device, syncing (as its name implies) syncs data between your iOS device and your Mac. This means that new apps or music or whatever that you’ve added to iTunes on your Mac will correctly transfer to your iOS device—and vice versa.
If you want to manually back up without syncing, you can do so at any time. Connect your iOS device to iTunes. From the Backups section of the device’s Summary screen, select Back Up Now. Done!
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