Just curious if anyone does this too in modern macOS’ Finder and older macOS/Windows’ iTunes. I started doing this to make extra back ups of my iPhones just in case. Yes, they take up extra precious storage. I also don’t use iCloud as my storage back ups.
Thank you for reading and hopefully answering soon. :)
I don’t. For me, those backups are only for recovering the phone if it dies in a way that forces me to completely wipe it. So I only care about the most recent backup.
I suppose if I really need an old one, I can go use Time Machine or CCC (which also uses snapshots for keeping old backups) to get an older one.
But so far, the only time I’ve ever actually used one of the backups has been to migrate everything to a new phone, before Apple created the ability to do a direct phone-to-phone migration.
I don’t keep very old back ups. I only do archive/rename for major changes like my old iOS v18.7.2 back up before upgrading to v26.2 just in case something goes bad. I also read that local iPhone back ups can get corrupted, but it’s rare.
I always wonder which iPhone to iPhone backup method is faster like from old 11 Pro Max (>200 GB of data out of 256 GB) to 17(?) Pro Max that will be in the future. I remember doing my 6+ (64? GB of data) to 12 mini in the past. That took a while.