Cloud does not work. If you have an app that is no longer available in the App Store, when you install from a backup you are out of luck because that app can’t be downloaded from the App Store.

If you choose to manage your phone from a Mac, then you can save a full backup.

It's not a binary choice: you can do a full local device backup occasionally and still use iCloud. That way you'll have saved copies of old apps available in case they get discontinued on the app store.

> to the cloud to locally

Requires payment for backup of any meaningful size.

> locally to your own storage

I don't own a mac. I own Linux. How do I backup iOS to my device? How do I restore it?

> I own Linux

Does idevicebackup/idevicerestore not work anymore?

But agreed, there's no technical reason why the phone can't just accept normal USB-connected storage and store a file in there (in whatever proprietary/encrypted format it wants, but at least the _storage_ is standards-compliant).

It seems to be actively maintained, so I would assume it still works:

https://github.com/libimobiledevice/libimobiledevice

The backup part definitely works, I haven't tried the restore part.

You can run macOS or Windows inside a VM on Linux.

Tecnically yes but slow as hell and you are using a software you are not licensed for in this case.

From Linux you literally cannot

>I own Linux.

That's the trouble with these niche desktop platforms, people don't write software for them.

Is windows also niche?

You can backup your phone to a Windows machine (using iTunes).

I think he meant iOS.

You never had chat apps that don't let you back up the chats? How about login tokens, authentications? That counts too. Are you able to roll them back selectively when an app misbehaves?

Unless something changed I believe on macos it has to back up to the system drive. I paid my $200 premium to get my 1tb drive on my laptop and my ios backups take up like 30% of that outright. In a perfect world I’d have a server that everything gets dumped to but macos and ios do not make that sort of setup very easy. There’s this ios issue. And people report issues with time machine over network. The whole ecosystem is a little screwed up. But yet I want their hardware so here I am dealing with the hoops they make me jump through. Always some poorly documented issue I run into like with their launchd or all the bullshit they make us now deal with for “security”. No issues when I write for work on centos of course, a proper os. What I would do for a macbook that shipped with no os.

I was able to relocate the backup via symlink.

FYI for anyone who just needs to backup using a Windows machine (for me: download hundreds/thousands of photos reliably), iMazing has worked well enough.