How to back up your iPhone to Google Drive

Google Drive

Google Drive is a great place to back up a lot of content held on your iPhone, mainly because of the 15GB of free storage you get with your Google account. That's more than enough to handle important documents along with a robust photo library, and you can use Google Drive to store an online backup of your iPhone or iPad.

By storing your iPhone backup online, you can easily retrieve the backup and restore your iPhone or iPad even if your usual PC or Mac is no longer working.

Read more: How to back up your iPhone and iPad
 

The first step is to download the Google Drive application for Windows or Mac.

The second step for backing up your iPhone or iPad is to run Google Drive. You don't need your iPhone or iPad plugged in since iTunes already backed up all of your files. It'll ask you to sign-in and then run you through a fairly short setup wizard. Follow the steps, and click "Done" once you're finished.

Google Drive should now be on your computer and the Google Drive folder it created will automatically open via your native file explorer.

Google Drive isn't your traditional backup service, but it works just as well, mainly because of how simple it is to sync files. In your file explorer, head on over to:

Users/Username/AppData/Roaming/Apple Computer/MobileSync/Backup

Find your latest backup, right click it, press copy, select your Google Drive folder, and press paste. Your backup should now be uploading to Google Drive, and depending on internet speed and how big the backup file is, this could take some time. 

For Mac users, you'll want to go to:

Library/Application Support/MobileSync/Backup

Then just copy and paste the backup folder in your Google Drive folder, as instructed above. However, it could be a bit more complicated finding your backup. To get specifics on either Windows or Mac, open up iTunes and head on over to iTunes Preferences > Devices. Either Control click or right click the backup you want, and click Show in Folder or Finder. It should take you to the exact location where your backup is.

Read more: How to backup iPhone and iPad with Dropbox and iCloud

Keep in mind that if you ever lose the backup on your computer, you can download your extra copy from Google Drive, but you'll need to make sure to put it in the exact same file location you got it from.