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While many of us rely on cloud storage these days for backing up photos, videos, and other files, every iPhone that can run iOS 17 also supports external storage devices: thats every iPhone back to 2018, so it includes the iPhone XR, the iPhone XS, and the iPhone XS Max.

Maybe you would rather manage file backups manually than via iCloud. (Its always worth remembering that cloud storage isnt completely infallible.) Maybe you need to access photos taken with a DSLR on your iPhone. Or maybe someone has given you a drive with files that youd like to move to your phone. There are a few reasons youd want to save files via an external storage device, and its not difficult to do.

With the arrival of the iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 15 Pro Max, theres a new reason: you can record video on these handsets using Apples high-definition ProRes video format at 4K resolution and 120 frames per second but only if an external storage device is attached. If you want the best video quality, you need an external drive.

Heres what you need to know about which external drives you can plug into your iPhone and what happens when you do.

How to choose an external drive

The good news is that Apple isnt too picky when it comes to which drives will work with your iPhone. Most flash drives, portable SSDs, external HDDs, and memory card readers are going to function okay, but there are caveats: you need to make sure youve got the right cable in place, and you need to make sure the drive is sufficiently powered.

As a general rule of thumb, if a device doesnt need an external power source when its connected to a laptop, it wont need one with your iPhone but if it does have its own power cable (like large-capacity HDD drives do), then youll also need this when connecting it to your iPhone. Just bear in mind that if a drive isnt powered separately, its going to drain power from your iPhone in order to run.

You then need the right connecting cable: whatever the external device uses at one end, and then Lightning or USB-C at the other end. If you cant find the right cable (some external drives use proprietary connectors, for example), then an adapter might be needed, but this shouldnt affect the functionality of the device.

When it comes to drive formats, you do have to be specific. There must only be one partition on the drive, and it must be formatted as APFS, APFS (encrypted), macOS Extended (HFS Plus), exFAT (FAT64), FAT32, or FAT in order to work. If the drive or memory card youve got isnt in one of these formats, then youll need to reformat it via a computer.

When it comes to recording 4K resolution, 60fps ProRes video, external drives need to offer write speeds of at least 220MB per second and have a maximum power draw of 4.5W, so be sure to check the specs carefully. Ideally, get yourself a drive thats advertised for this purpose or that you know other users have had success with.

How to use an external drive

Assuming youve taken all of the above considerations into account, you should find that your phone shows up under Locations in the Browse tab of the Files app in iOS when you connect it to the external drive. If it doesnt, its not been identified it might be underpowered or set to an incompatible file format.

External drives will show up under the Locations heading.

Press and hold on any file or folder to bring up some options.

To access files on the external device:

The same options you get in Files for local iPhone storage are available for external storage too. Tap the three dots in the top-right corner, and youll be able to create a new folder, for example. Long-press on a file or folder, and you can duplicate or rename it.

To copy and move files from the external device:

You can select multiple files for copying or moving.

Photos and videos can be sent straight over to the Photos app.

Note that if your external device is set to read only, you can only copy files. If you try and move them, youll see Copy rather than Move on the final step.

For photos and videos, likely to be something a lot of people are working with in these scenarios, you can tap on the file to open it, then tap its file name (at the top) and choose Save to Photos to copy it over to your iPhones main gallery.

Its all relatively straightforward, and if youre already comfortable with the ins and outs of the Files app, you shouldnt have any trouble working with external devices, too.

View post:
How to use an external storage device with your iPhone - The Verge

So much of our digital lives now exist solely in the cloud. Companies like Apple, Google, and Microsoft make it all too easy to upload our important files to cloud storage from the moment we set up our devices.

On one hand, that's a good thing: If something happens to your phone, tablet, or laptop, that doesn't mean you lose all your messages, photos, and documentsassuming all that info is properly backed up to the cloud. When you get your device fixed or replaced, you can sign back into your account and pull all that data down from the cloud without losing anything in the transition. In fact, I suspect that our collective data has never been more secured than it is today, thanks to the abundance and simplicity of cloud storage.

However, that's not to say that our backup situation is perfectfar from it. Relying solely on the cloud for data storage can have disastrous consequences.

You can see those consequences in play this week: Unfortunately, some Google Drive users are reporting missing files dating back to May 2023. Google has publicly acknowledged the issue and is investigating, but that investigation won't necessarily bring back any of the files that have vanished from these users' Google Drive accounts. (I guess they'd just have to take comfort in knowing that Google figured out why it happened?)

For your protection, one Google Drive team member did warn users not to click disconnect account on Google Drive for desktop, and to avoid deleting or moving data in the following folders:

...but that's not exactly a big comfort.

To be clear, this event is not common. Companies like Google, Apple, and Microsoft host a lot of data from millions, if not billions, of users, without regularly losing any of it. Still, if it can happen once, it can happen again. Perhaps Apple announces next year that iCloud had an issue, and three months worth of photo uploads are now gone. Maybe Microsoft loses OneDrive user's data next October. You can't assume these services will be infallible forever.

That isn't to say don't use them. I use iCloud for just about everything I do in the Apple ecosystem. However, for anything important, you need to make sure you have a secondary backup in case something goes wrong.

That's what's likely playing out with these affected Google Drive users right now: Some of them will have used their Google Drive accounts as a secondary backup for their files, keeping another backup of them stored on a hard drive or another cloud service. They'll be frustrated, but not panicked, as the lost files will still be in this alternate location. Unfortunately, any users that added these files to Google Drive and deleted them from their computer (or created them in Drive and never made a backup) are likely very unhappy this week.

So let's talk about a secure backup situation looks like. Say you have an archive of important documents stored on your computer. They only exist on your computer, so if your SSD goes belly-up, those files are toast. So, what can you do? One easy solution is to add a copy of these files to a secondary location, whether that's an external hard drive or cloud storage. Now, these files exist in two places separate from each other. If the SSD breaks, they're in the cloud. If the cloud glitches out, they're on your computer. If the files are super important, making additional backups ensures that should an unlikely disaster strike, you'll still have access. Having files stored in at least two separate locations is usually enough protection for most of us.

But let's say your computer is running out of storage, and you don't want to store the files locally anymore. Don't simply dump them on the cloud or on an external SSD, delete them from your PC, and call it a dayone backup is no backup, after all. You'll want to copy them to another cloud storage or external storage solution to ensure there are at least two copies of those files somewhere.

Where this starts to get a bit tricky is when using automated cloud storage options like iCloud. Apple makes it easy to connect all your data to iCloud so you never really need to think about constantly backing things up. When you take a photo, it stores on your iPhone and iCloud: When you send a message, same thing.

While you technically have two files in two separate locations, a service like iCloud is tied to your iPhone. If you delete a message from your iPhone, it helpfully deletes that text from the cloud too. If you delete a photo from your library, it gets deleted from iCloud (after a 30 day countdown, anyway). That's by design, and it means your files aren't totally secure against data loss.

What I like to do is rely on cloud storage solutions like iCloud for general backing up purposes (if I lose my iPhone, signing into a new one with my Apple ID brings all my data back), while also making a full backup of my devices to an external source. You can make a backup of your iPhone to iTunes or Finder on your computer, for example, while still having all your data stored in iCloud. That way, if you accidentally delete a thread of messages from your iPhone and iCloud at once, you can restore from your backup to get them back. The same goes for missing photos, notes, contacts, or anything else that gets lost.

While you can rely on full cloud backups for a similar approach, they tend to back up automatically and overwrite the previous backup, so your chances of restoring to a backup that also is missing the data you're looking for is high. The tradeoff with external backups, such as to a computer, is they're less frequent, so you may miss new messages and photos that were added since the last backup. It's a balancing act, but the point is to protect your data in as many ways as possible.

Photos are probably the thing I worry about losing most, and would be devastated if something happened to Apple's servers and I lost every photo I've ever taken with mu iPhone. So on my Mac, I choose the "Download Originals to this Mac" option in Photos' settings under iCloud. That way, my Mac always has a backup of the full-res photos and videos in my library, while my other devices can pull from the cloud as needed. Should something happen to the photos on Apple's end, my Mac has all my media saved securely.

This conversation can get a little in the weeds, especially as you start to focus on specific services. (OneDrive, Google Drive, iCloud, etc.) But the general rule of thumb for all backups is simple: You need to keep all of your important files stored in at least two separate locations. So long as you have another source to pull your files from, you can safely weather any disasterdigital or physicalthat befalls your data.

See more here:
You Shouldn't Rely Only on Cloud Storage to Back Up Your Files - Lifehacker