Back Up Your iPhone
Before you dispose of your old iPhone, you need to make sure all the apps and data you have are safely stored somewhere. Apple provides 5GB of free iCloud storage, and the good news is that things like apps don’t count against that in your backups, but it still may not be enough if you have a lot of pictures and videos stored on your iPhone.
On the other hand, if you’re paying for an iCloud+ plan, that should give you plenty of space to back up your iPhone to the cloud — and even if you’re not paying for storage or you don’t want to upgrade to a larger plan, Apple will provide enough temporary iCloud storage for up to 21 days to help you transfer your data to a new iPhone.
Here’s how to manually back up your iPhone to iCloud:
- Open the Settings app.
- Tap on your Apple ID.
- Go to iCloud.
- Select iCloud Backup.
- Tap on Back Up Now.
If you don’t have enough storage in your iCloud plan and you’re transferring your data to a new iPhone, you can follow these steps instead to take advantage of Apple’s offer of temporary iCloud storage:
- Open the Settings app.
- Select General.
- Scroll down and choose Transfer or Reset iPhone.
- Select Get Started under Prepare for New iPhone.
- Choose Turn On Backup to Transfer.
- Select Continue at the prompt that says you’re eligible to get extra iCloud storage for free.
Note that you’ll only see the last two options if iCloud backups are disabled and you don’t already have enough storage in your iCloud plan. After the backup completes, it will be kept on Apple’s servers for up to 21 days to give you time to restore it to your new iPhone.