How Do I Backup All My Files To a USB Device, Like Backing Up To an iMac?

Comments: 3 Responses to “How Do I Backup All My Files To a USB Device, Like Backing Up To an iMac?”

Gary Rosenzweig

4 years ago

There is no way to back up your iPad to a drive directly. But iOS devices work wonderfully as cloud devices. If you are using this as your only computing device, this is how you should do it.

First, use iCloud backup. This will back up all of your documents and settings. You don't need to back up apps and the system since you can just get those from Apple if disaster strikes. Without those, your backup can be pretty small, depending on what you are doing.

But also by storing all of your things in iCloud Drive (and iCloud Photos) you don't really even need much of a backup. If you get a new iPad, you just log on to iCloud and all of your things are there in iCloud Drive.

Bob Colbenson

4 years ago

How do you isolate files being backed up so that all system and app files are not backed up? Just Document and image files being backed up

Gary Rosenzweig

4 years ago

Bob: Go to System Preferences, Time Machine, then click the Options button. Then check Exclude System Files and Applications.