Your Ultimate Backup is the bridge between the two devices. You copy the files from your computer onto the drive first, then connect that same drive to your phone or tablet and copy them across from there. The files travel on the drive rather than over the internet, and the steps are the same whether they are headed for an iPhone, an iPad, or an Android phone or tablet.
Step 1: Put the files on your Ultimate Backup
Connect your Ultimate Backup to your Mac or Windows computer. There are two ways to get files onto it.
- Run a backup in the computer app. On the Home screen, press Start Backup. The four toggles beneath it — Photos, Videos, Docs and Music — set which kinds of file are included.
- Copy particular files across by hand. Open Finder on a Mac or File Explorer on Windows, select the drive, and drag the files or folders you want into the drive's top-level Backups folder. Anything you place inside Backups is picked up by the app and can be copied onto your phone or tablet in step 3.
The Backups folder is the only part of the drive the app looks at, and inside it everything is kept per device, so you will see folders such as Backups/iPhone, Backups/iPad and Backups/Mac. Files left elsewhere on the drive are invisible to the app, although they still take up room and still count towards the total shown in Overview.
To check what is already on the drive, click Files on UB Drive on the left: it opens in list view with Name, Type, Date Modified and Size columns, a checkbox on each row for picking out individual items, and two buttons at the top right that switch between list and grid view. View Files on Ultimate Backup covers that screen in more detail.
Step 2: Connect the drive to your phone or tablet
When the copying has finished, eject the drive safely — the banner across the top of the computer app does that for you — then unplug it and connect it to the phone or tablet you want the files to end up on.
Step 3: Copy the files onto your phone or tablet
In the mobile app this is the Restore process: it copies files from the Ultimate Backup onto the device the drive is plugged into, which is now your phone or tablet.
- Open the Ultimate Backup app on your phone or tablet.
- Tap Settings, then Restore Files, then Got it! on the prompt.
- Tick the device folder you want, or open it and select individual files and folders — including anything you copied across by hand.
- Tap Start Restore and leave the drive connected until it has finished.
On Android, photos and videos copied across this way can be found in the Gallery app. The full steps with screenshots are in Copy Files from Ultimate Backup to iPhone or iPad and Copy Files from Ultimate Backup to Android.
If your drive cannot connect to your phone directly
Some phones and tablets cannot take the drive directly. Manual Backup Mode is the answer to that in the other direction: the mobile app saves the phone's files to your Ultimate Backup account, and the computer app then writes them onto the drive. It works that way round only, so if the drive will not connect to your phone or tablet, there is no supported way to copy files from your computer onto that device at the moment.
If you are having trouble getting your files onto your phone or tablet, contact us and we will be happy to help.