One of the few things I constantly annoy people with is backing up their devices. This is important because you never know when a device will fail and losing all data is a source of some nightmares for everyone. iPhones don’t usually suffer from irreversible problems very often, but it’s still a good idea to back them up. If so, here’s how to back up your iPhone with a Windows PC.
Backup iPhone in Windows 10
A few months ago, when I primarily used a Mac as my daily drive, it was ridiculously easy to create and delete iPhone backups. However, now that I’m mostly on a Windows PC at work, things are a bit more complicated than they were on macOS.
If you’re in the same boat as me, don’t worry, follow this article to learn how iPhone backups work on Windows. As always, you can use the table of contents below to jump to the section you want.
Backup iPhone with Windows using iTunes
Although iTunes is no longer available on macOS and the backup feature is now integrated into the Mac Finder app, the software is still available for Windows. In fact, it is the recommended method to manage an iPhone or iPad with a Windows PC. Here’s how to use iTunes on Windows to back up iOS devices.
- download iTunes
- Connect your iPhone to your Windows PC with the included Lightning cable. If your iPhone has a USB-C to Lightning cable and your PC doesn’t have a USB-C port, you may need a dongle.
- Click the phone icon in the top bar of iTunes. This will open the main phone management screen in the software.
- Select ‘This PC’ to back up your iPhone to the local drive on your PC. You can also enable/disable encrypted backups here.
Note: If you disable encrypted backups, your passwords and Health and HomeKit data will not be backed up.
- Click ‘Back Up Now’ to start backing up your iPhone.
Backup iPhone with Windows using iMazing
If for some reason you don’t want to use iTunes, you can also try the much more feature-rich iMazing app to back up your iPhone on your Windows computer.
- download iMazing
- C Connect your iPhone to your Windows PC with the included Lightning cable. If your iPhone has a USB-C to Lightning cable and your PC doesn’t have a USB-C port, you may need a dongle.
- Launch iMazing on your PC and click ‘Backup’.
- You can edit the settings for your backups here, including encrypted backups, backup location, and more. Once you have everything set up the way you want, simply click on Backup.
That’s it, iMazing will start backing up your iPhone to the location chosen by you.
Easily Backup Your iPhone on Windows Computers
That’s pretty much everything you need to know about backing up your iPhone locally to your Windows computer. You can also use iCloud backups if you don’t want to be dependent on your PC. However, the free 5GB will require you to purchase additional iCloud storage as it won’t be enough to back up your entire iPhone.
Personally, I prefer to backup my iPhone locally and using iTunes or iMazing is the easiest and frankly the best way to do it. If you encounter any errors while trying to backup your iPhone with a Windows PC, let us know in the comments and we will try to help you.
