[IncandescentGas]

Your phone could become damaged and inoperable every day. From dropping it in the toilet, being stolen, a house fire, etc. If you're "petrified" of losing your data, it's worth the work to ensure your data backup procedures are adequate.

[gorgoiler]

You’re right, but also I know I have enough backed up to survive a catastrophe. What I don’t want to do is to test my backup in a non catastrophe situation and invalidate all my TOTP, WhatsApp history, mail settings etc. just because I wanted to test disaster recovery.

It feels like buying a fire safe (phone and app backups) without any kind of understanding if it works then burning your house down to see if it works. I want a fire safe (phone and app backups) that is up-front with guarantees it works!

I should have said this by the way: for a long time I did wipe my phone when crossing borders, learning the hard way all the little details that don’t quite work properly when doing a restore from backups.

[Izikiel43]

> What I don’t want to do is to test my backup in a non catastrophe situation

Isn't that actually one of the things you want to do to validate the backup process?

Better to figure out in a non disaster scenario where you have alternatives.

[fragmede]

Analogies only go so far. Going to the store, buying gasoline and rags and a lighter and then committing arson and burning my house down is maybe a little bit different from sitting down for a few hours with my laptop connected to my phone.

[IncandescentGas]

Right! Backup planning is not black magic. And neither is testing icloud backups.

It's quite easy to restore an icloud backup to a different phone or even ipad for testing purposes, if one were reliant on icloud to hold their data.

[gausswho]

I've spent the last month and a half building an encyrpted backup system I could sleep peacefully with, independent of tech giants that secretly compromise you. I'm almost there but it's not easy for a lot of reasons you mention and more.

Ultimately it's not enough for individuals to spend this effort for themselves. We need a self-managed option that is nearly as turnkey as iCloud. A distro with it built from the outset.

[fragmede]

tarsnap?

[Gud]

rsync to rsync.net?

[ta1243]

Is it even possible to test a backup of a typical phone without first wiping the phone?

It's not like my backup of my ~/Photos directory where I can copy to a USB and md5sum the files on a separate computer and check the match.

[IncandescentGas]

Yes. You can restore your icloud backup to another target iphone without wiping the source iphone, as long as the target iphone has enough storage capacity.