Your Ultimate Backup is the bridge between the two devices. Nothing has to travel from your phone to your computer over the internet — you back your phone or tablet up onto the drive, then connect that same drive to your computer and copy the files off it. The steps below are the same whether you are using an iPhone, an iPad, or an Android phone or tablet.
Step 1: Back up your phone or tablet to the drive
If the files you want are already on the drive from an earlier backup, you can skip ahead to step 2.
- Connect your Ultimate Backup to your phone or tablet.
- Open the Ultimate Backup app.
- On the Home screen, tap Start Backup.
- Leave the drive connected until the backup has finished.
Your photos and files are now stored on the drive itself, not in an online account, so they are ready to be copied to any computer you plug the drive into.
Step 2: Connect the drive to your computer
When the backup has finished, disconnect the drive from your phone or tablet and connect it to your Mac or Windows computer.
Step 3: Copy the files onto the computer
Open the Ultimate Backup app on your computer and click Restore on the left. Restore is the reverse of a backup: it copies files from the drive onto the device it is connected to, which is now your computer. Copy Files from Ultimate Backup to Computer walks through the whole process, including how to choose what is copied and where it is saved.
If you would rather pick out a few files by hand, you can browse the drive instead:
- In the computer app, click Files on UB Drive on the left to look through the folders copied from each of your devices. View Files on Ultimate Backup shows what to expect.
- Or open the drive directly, without the app. Open Finder on a Mac or File Explorer on Windows, select the drive, and you will find a folder named Backups holding everything you have backed up. You can copy files out of it as you would from any other drive.
If your drive cannot connect to your phone directly
Some phones and tablets cannot take the drive directly. In that case the mobile app can run the backup in Manual Backup Mode, which places your files in your Ultimate Backup account for a short while; the computer app then signs in to the same account and saves them onto the drive. Once the computer app has finished that part, the files are on the drive and step 3 above works as usual. How and Why to Enable Manual Backup Mode
If you are having trouble getting your files across to your computer, contact us and we will be happy to help.