Problem with backing up iPhone

TidBITS Talk
1

Every morning I manually back up my iPhone and iPads. First I back them up to iCloud. Then I go to my computer and back them up to my computer using iTunes. I have iTunes set up to connect over wifi. I also have it set to automatic backup to iCloud. Sunday, when I connected to iTunes, the iPads worked as they always do and I first synced then backed up to my computer. But the iPhone came up set to automatically back up to this computer. I selected automatically backup to iCloud and hit apply and it defaulted back to backup to this computer. All of the devices ios devices were on i0s 12.4. This morning I updated the iPhone to 12.4.1 but that didn’t make a difference. Last night I upgraded the iMac to 10.14.6 so I assume it was on 10.14.5 yesterday.

I want to iPhone to remember that the default is to backup to iCloud. Any ideas?

(Applecare could replicate the issue but not find a solution. They’ve set a message to engineering and I’ve gone to apple.com/feedback to let them know I’m not happy with this.)

2

Not a very good assumption. There have been three different builds of 10.14.6 released to the public. The original update from 10.14.5 was on July 22, followed by a supplemental on Aug 5 and another supplemental yesterday, resulting in build (18G95).

3

I will say that this seems like an awful lot of extra work for very little benefit. Automatic nightly backups to iCloud are what I’d recommend for most people, along with the occasional backup to iTunes if you’re making a big change and want a secondary backup. The only reason I can see to do this level of backup for iOS is if you’re creating a vast amount of content on your devices every day in such a way that it’s not stored in the cloud as well.