Backup to iCloud - Why?

[theotherjake]

After spending hours downloading and installing IOS5 on my iPhone 4 last night I found the option to backup to iCloud instead of locally.

What is the advantage of this? surely using time machine captures the backup data. Why would you restore an iDevice from the cloud? Plus judging by how long it took to install the new OS locally it would take hours!

 

[miles01110]

Cloud backups are less prone to hard drive failure than your Time Machine backup.

Well, that's assuming Apple implemented enterprise-standard data storage redundancy at their data center(s), but that's probably a safe bet.

 

[theotherjake]

I just tried to back to iCloud from my iPhone, and the message i got was 'Backup failed' lol. Good this new service!

 

[redgaz26]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 5_0 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/534.46 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.1 Mobile/9A334 Safari/7534.48.3)

So you can set up your new 4s as soon as you get it. !!!!

 

[brezz]

I'm unable to backup as well. It worked on my iphone, but I set up a new apple ID for my wife and it won't back her's up. Any ideas?

Brian

 

[decafjava]

Can't you do both? Not upgraded yet.

 

[MiataMac]

Since you don't need a computer any more to activate an iPhone, some people without computers ( ) might like to be able to backup to the cloud.

I don't use it myself though, iTunes backup is fine for me, then I have it both locally and on TimeMachine, so that's backup in two places - plus the actual iPhone of course keeping the data as well.

 

[C64]

The initial backup might take a while. I presume it only backs up stuff that changed after that, so that might go pretty quick.

 

[ugahairydawgs]

The initial backup might take a while. I presume it only backs up stuff that changed after that, so that might go pretty quick.

On top of this, with the service just coming out of beta and opening up to everyone the initial load is probably pretty significant (like we saw yesterday with iOS5 activations).

Give everything a few days to fester (Monday, after all of the initial i4S activations, would be a good bet) and it should be working fairly well.