HT203977: How to back up your iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch

Learn about How to back up your iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch
starbucksbear
Level 1 (12 points)
iCloud

Q: Desperate to backup iPhone to external drive directly. HP Stream has zero space.

I have spent countless hours trying to find a solution to my issue. My iPhone is clogged with thousands of photos and videos of my late loved ones, and yes, they are in iCloud as well.

 

I want to put ALL the media on the phone directly onto an external drive. I have an HP Stream, meant to be used in conjunction with cloud drives. Thus, there is literally NO room on it to back up.

 

There's another thing. I've spent ages trying to figure out how to get all of the media in my iCloud Drive as well.

 

I'm so frustrated from the lack of clear, simple direction that I've actually considered moving to Samsung.

Trust me...I don't want to!

 

I don't want my media slowly disappearing from iCloud, or anywhere else.

 

For the love of all that is good, please, someone help me.

 

:-(

 

About to give up in New England,

 

Michael

iPhone 5, iOS 8.4

Posted on Jul 10, 2016 7:38 AM

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starbucksbear

Q: Desperate to backup iPhone to external drive directly. HP Stream has zero space.

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  • Helpful answers

  • by Drew Reece,

    Drew Reece Drew Reece Jul 10, 2016 8:19 AM in response to starbucksbear
    Level 5 (7,456 points)
    Notebooks
    Jul 10, 2016 8:19 AM in response to starbucksbear

    You need to address the issue with the PC before you copy items from the iOS device.

     

    iTunes can make backups of the device content, however iTunes stores the data on the internal disk of your PC, so that won't work.

    Alternatively you can import photos/ videos from the device to Windows as described at (see the 'Import to PC' section)…

    Import photos and videos from your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch - Apple Support

    The main problem is that it also uses the internal storage on the PC as far as I can tell - which is too full to be usable.

     

    You could also login it iCloud.com & try downloading the files from there, however that will also fail if you try to save the files to the internal disk.

    I'd suggest you use disk size or backup tools to find what is taking up space on the PC & back that up to your external disk. Then you can safely clear out old files to free some space.

     

    Once there is free space on the PC you can get the data from the iOS device. Sorry, iCloud & iOS has it's faults but the lack of free space on your PC isn't really Apple's fault. Samsung devices also save backups to internal disks, so they would probably have the same issue too.