[dkbllb]

This might not be the right forum to ask but I'll give it a shot.

My wife and I just got new XR's but I can't get them to automatically back up to the cloud. There's plenty of room in our account and I have auto backup turned on in settings. According to what I read they should automatically go when plugged in and the screen locked, but they don't. I can get them to backup however when I manually set them off.

I'm sure that I'm doing, or not doing something that's causing the problem. Any ideas?

[Tartarus]

This might not be the right forum to ask but I'll give it a shot.

My wife and I just got new XR's but I can't get them to automatically back up to the cloud. There's plenty of room in our account and I have auto backup turned on in settings. According to what I read they should automatically go when plugged in and the screen locked, but they don't. I can get them to backup however when I manually set them off.

I'm sure that I'm doing, or not doing something that's causing the problem. Any ideas?

Are they both on WiFi?
Auto backup mostly occurs deep in the night, between 2 and 5 am.

[dkbllb]

Yes, they're on WiFi.

You bring up an interesting point. I assumed the backup would immediately start after plugged in and locked. Does it not start until some time later? Regardless, they were plugged in all night from about 10:00 pm to 6:00 this morning.

[dkbllb]

One other thought comes to mind. We obviously have raise to wake and facial recognition turned on (which we love!) So I'm assuming that the screen is "locked" as required if it's black and just laying there charging. Is there something else that needs to be done to lock the screen?

[BreakingKayfabe]

I assumed the backup would immediately start after plugged in and locked.

No, it doesn't start immediately. The phone basically learns periods of inactivity on the user end while plugged in and decides on the backup. When I used to use iCloud backup my phone would usually backup between 1am-2am since I plug in overnight.

[dkbllb]

Thanks for the replies. I finally contacted Apple Support and was told that since the phones share the same Apple ID, they both won't necessarily back up each time they're plugged in because they each have the same data. As has been said by others here, the backup will occur sometime during the night. They also won't necessarily backup every night and might go a day or two before doing it.

Since my first post the phones have been periodically backing up - sometimes both and sometimes just one. Last night neither one of them did it.

This seems pretty strange to me but I guess for the time being I won't worry and will just keep an eye on it.