How can I backup Voice Memos AND get them off of my iPhone?

[Tarnisher]

I use the Voice Memos app on my iPhone A LOT. I record practices, improvisations, song ideas, and friends’ bands. I’ve been doing this for over a decade, so I now have over 40 GB of recordings.

I have Voice Memos synced with iCloud, and that works well as a backup except for one thing. I can’t delete any of them from my phone to free up space without deleting the backup as well.

I can’t be the only one who wants to keep more data than I want to carry around.

Anyone have a good solution?

 

[telemnemonics]

I have deleted content on my iphone that is in cloud storage and never saw anything saying it also gets deleted from icloud.
Never tried to delete from voice memo though, I tend to record music on video and have 2tb icloud storage for $10/ month.
Maybe call apple support?
Or create audio files on a laptop then delete from iphone?

 

[dented]

Lol, I turn on my computer microphone and play them on the phone and record them into the computer! Pretty lame but it works.

 

[Tarnisher]

Every

I have deleted content on my iphone that is in cloud storage and never saw anything saying it also gets deleted from icloud.
Never tried to delete from voice memo though, I tend to record music on video and have 2tb icloud storage for $10/ month.
Maybe call apple support?
Or create audio files on a laptop then delete from iphone?

Everything I’ve read said if you delete in one place it deletes everywhere else. That’s one of the key differences between sync and backup. But I admit, I didn’t test it out. Frankly, even if I do and find it doesn’t delete it from iCloud, I don’t entirely trust it not to later. I’d really like a third party backup thatI could upload files to.

I use Flickr for photos instead of iPhoto for exactly this reason. I just need an audio equivalent.

 

[srblue5]

It used to be that whenever I synced my iPhone with my computer (also an Apple), the voice memos would automatically back up to my iTunes or Music app. Then one day it stopped doing that automatically and I've never figured out how to make it happen again.

To that end, I now end up Airdrop-ing my voice memos manually to a computer to back them up and then delete them from my phone.

I use iCloud but I don't necessarily trust it. I also don't trust smartphones themselves -- last year, my iPhone randomly decided to reboot itself (no advance warning) and deleted everything in the process. Pictures, videos, contacts, chats/texts, everything. Thankfully I had iCloud already set up for my photos (especially ones from a big vacation last year) but everything was lost and unrecoverable.

 

[wrathfuldeity]

I dictate a fair amount on "Notes" and then Air Drop to my laptop

 

[teletimetx]

I use the Voice Memos app on my iPhone A LOT. I record practices, improvisations, song ideas, and friends’ bands. I’ve been doing this for over a decade, so I now have over 40 GB of recordings.

I have Voice Memos synced with iCloud, and that works well as a backup except for one thing. I can’t delete any of them from my phone to free up space without deleting the backup as well.

I can’t be the only one who wants to keep more data than I want to carry around.

Anyone have a good solution?

Yeah, airdrop is a good approach - or set up a separate email account. Something like tarnishermusic@gmail.com - then using the share feature, just send any file you want to save to your music email account. You can store it there or download it to laptop or other device.

 

[Tarnisher]

Sorry to hear it, srblue! Yeah, it’s hard to believe I miss iTunes, but I do. It actually did a lot of things really well, like managing original recordings.

Apple killed it because they saw that the future is streaming, and cloud storage.

I understand that people want things to be simple, and sync up automatically on all devices. But at the same time they’ve sold us on iCloud sync instead of hard drive backup, they’ve also reduced internal memory in most devices. Am I the only one who sees that this makes no sense?

Sync is great, but we need backup too, unless all our devices have tons of storage!

 

[srblue5]

Sorry to hear it, srblue! Yeah, it’s hard to believe I miss iTunes, but I do. It actually did a lot of things really well, like managing original recordings.

Apple killed it because they saw that the future is streaming, and cloud storage.

I understand that people want things to be simple, and sync up automatically on all devices. But at the same time they’ve sold us on iCloud sync instead of hard drive backup, they’ve also reduced internal memory in most devices. Am I the only one who sees that this makes no sense?

100%.

Call me a luddite if you must, but while I'm not completely anti-digital or anti-technological advancement, I think a lot of technology has deteriorated since maybe the mid-2000s. Apple/iTunes had a good setup back around 2005 or 2006.

I have always just wanted something that works reliably to store my music (especially the stuff I create which cannot be replaced, even if it's not very good) and that I can access at any time regardless of whether I have a reliable internet connection and without having to pay increasing premiums for. Is that too much to ask?

I am often leery of anyone who touts some newfangled technology as "The way of the future" (which so far includes the majority of sound techs and music store employees I have come across).

 

[Tarnisher]

I think Drop Box is my best bet. You can upload multiple files from the VM app, it’s not too pricey, and it’s reliable.

 

[Brent Hutto]

We get gobs of OneDrive storage as part of our $99 annual Microsoft 365 subscription. Anything that gets captured and stored on our phones, there's a OneDrive option under the share menu of the app or whatever. However, as a belt-plus-suspenders thing we also let the phones do their night iCloud backup.

I think you may find Microsoft is a better value for money. Last I looked it was something around $9/month for Dropbox. For $99/year up to six people in your household each get 1000GB of OneDrive storage. You also get up to six Outlook mailboxes (each with 50GB of email) and use of all the Microsoft Office apps.

 

[Lou Tencodpees]

My old Samsung Android had years of noodles and doodles (recordings of song ideas, lyrics, writings on note pads). I didn't back them up and the phone died. Attempts to recover and/or repair didn't work and I was left with the dilemma of potentially spending a ton of money from a data recovery place and still not succeeding. I took my lumps and considered it a lesson learned.

If you value content, back it up. Which reminds me, I'm overdue backing up my new phone.

 

[imwjl]

We get gobs of OneDrive storage as part of our $99 annual Microsoft 365 subscription. Anything that gets captured and stored on our phones, there's a OneDrive option under the share menu of the app or whatever. However, as a belt-plus-suspenders thing we also let the phones do their night iCloud backup.

I think you may find Microsoft is a better value for money. Last I looked it was something around $9/month for Dropbox. For $99/year up to six people in your household each get 1000GB of OneDrive storage. You also get up to six Outlook mailboxes (each with 50GB of email) and use of all the Microsoft Office apps.

I have a few storage services but both Apple and Microsoft cloud are paid subscriptions so I mirror vital stuff between the two with periodic to disk backups. A Mac makes your storage for the two clouds easy in Finder, but iCloud and the web version also work find with my Windows 11 Surface laptop.

Some of the other comments are not making sense to me. None of Apple Music's evolution has killed or stopped me from still having non-streaming stuff from years ago. If not Apple's help content, I suggest searching for YouTube lessons. Another good source for learning is ask ChatGPT, Gemini or a Copilot question.

 

[buster poser]

I think you want to turn off syncing for voice memos in iCloud, delete one test memo from your phone just to check that it doesn’t clear from iCloud, and if successful just delete them all from the iPhone. You can move memos around to folders within that storage “area” in iCloud as well, useful for archiving.

We have the family/One or whatever plan, but I think the upgraded storage is still a pretty good deal on its own if you lean on anything that hangs off their storage/service ‘cloud.’ Good luck

No affiliation:

 

[Ed Driscoll]

I use the Voice Memos app on my iPhone A LOT. I record practices, improvisations, song ideas, and friends’ bands. I’ve been doing this for over a decade, so I now have over 40 GB of recordings.

I have Voice Memos synced with iCloud, and that works well as a backup except for one thing. I can’t delete any of them from my phone to free up space without deleting the backup as well.

I can’t be the only one who wants to keep more data than I want to carry around.

Anyone have a good solution?

Get them off your iPhone one way or another, then import them into a DAW or music editing program like Izotope RX, and then save them as WAVs, AIFF, MP3s, or some other file format that isn't .m4a, then you should be able to delete the original Voice Memos files.

 

[Skyhook]

On an Android phone you can just dongle-connect a USB-stick to the phone
and then copy/paste whatever it is you wish to backup.

 

[Alcohen]

Exporting individual files is easy. Copying over the whole library, there may be a way - perhaps from your icloud account - but you'll have to look it up. There are non-apple programs that create independent backups of your iphone - iMazing is excellent.

To export an individual file, look for the three-dot menu and touch that:

Then select the option that works best for you:

From the Share menu, there are all the usual options. Someone mentioned OneDrive. One of the many things I hate about Microsoft is they don't make that an automatic option across the Mac Share menu. In fact, I haven't been able to figure out how to make that an option. If anyone can educate us on that, it would be really helpful.

 

[Tarnisher]

Yeah, airdrop is a good approach - or set up a separate email account. Something like tarnishermusic@gmail.com - then using the share feature, just send any file you want to save to your music email account. You can store it there or download it to laptop or other device.

That’s what I used to do before I figured out how to sync with iTunes. It’s really time consuming and I would always forget and then have to spend a long time doing it. I would also have to pay Google once I go over the free storage.

With Drop Box I can at least select a bunch of files and upload them at once without hitting the max for an email.

 

[Tarnisher]

We get gobs of OneDrive storage as part of our $99 annual Microsoft 365 subscription. Anything that gets captured and stored on our phones, there's a OneDrive option under the share menu of the app or whatever. However, as a belt-plus-suspenders thing we also let the phones do their night iCloud backup.

I think you may find Microsoft is a better value for money. Last I looked it was something around $9/month for Dropbox. For $99/year up to six people in your household each get 1000GB of OneDrive storage. You also get up to six Outlook mailboxes (each with 50GB of email) and use of all the Microsoft Office apps.

Thanks, I’ll look into OneDrive too!

 

[Tarnisher]

I have a few storage services but both Apple and Microsoft cloud are paid subscriptions so I mirror vital stuff between the two with periodic to disk backups. A Mac makes your storage for the two clouds easy in Finder, but iCloud and the web version also work find with my Windows 11 Surface laptop.

Some of the other comments are not making sense to me. None of Apple Music's evolution has killed or stopped me from still having non-streaming stuff from years ago. If not Apple's help content, I suggest searching for YouTube lessons. Another good source for learning is ask ChatGPT, Gemini or a Copilot question.

It’s not that Apples Music’a evolution prevents you from having your old content. But they are no longer in the business of developing and maintaining software for managing user-created audio files. Of course, they never really were. The ability to do so was just a convenient bonus in iTunes. But Apple Music is in no way a file management tool- it’s only for accessing licensed content. It might still be possible to load your own files- I know it used to be doable in Spotify. But it’s not simple compared to how it was with iTunes. I too have hard drives full of MP3’s and AAC’s but it’s such a pain to access them that I rarely do.