iTunes is gone. Here's how to back up your iPhone in 2026
Apple killed iTunes in 2019 and split its job across four apps — and iPhone backup got the worst of the deal. Here's where syncing actually lives now, and how to get the old workflow back.
Where iTunes actually went
Apple retired iTunes on the Mac in 2019, with macOS Catalina. Its jobs were split up: music went to the Music app, movies to TV, podcasts to Podcasts — and iPhone syncing, the part nobody was ready to lose, was quietly folded into Finder. Plug in your phone today and it appears in the Finder sidebar, wearing a stripped-down version of the old iTunes device screen.
On Windows, iTunes limped on for a few more years before Apple replaced it with the Apple Devices app. But if you're on a Mac, Finder is the official answer now. The problem is what got lost in the move.
What Finder kept — and what it dropped
Finder kept the two headline features: full-device backups and media library syncing. If you want a restorable snapshot of your whole phone before an upgrade, Finder still does that, and it's genuinely the right tool for it.
What it dropped is everything people actually used day to day:
- Your files stay locked up. A Finder backup is one opaque image made for restoring a phone. You can't open it, browse your photos in it, or pull out a single voice memo.
- No selection. It's the whole device or nothing. You can't say "just photos and videos" or see what's about to transfer before it starts.
- Wi-Fi sync got flakier. The "Show this iPhone when on Wi-Fi" option exists, but devices routinely vanish from the sidebar mid-sync. It was shaky in iTunes; it did not improve.
- Syncs fail and start over. A flaky cable or a Wi-Fi hiccup means babysitting a progress bar and hoping this run is the one that finishes.
Just want your photos? The Photos app or Image Capture can import your camera roll over a cable — media only, manually, every time. If that's your whole need, start there before paying for anything.
The three jobs "backup" actually means
Part of the confusion is that "back up my iPhone" means three different jobs, and no single Apple tool does all of them:
| The job | Right tool | The catch |
|---|---|---|
| Restorable snapshot before an upgrade | Finder device backup | Opaque image — you can't open it |
| Photos & videos as real files | A dedicated sync app | The good ones cost money |
| Automatic top-ups as you take new photos | iCloud — or a sync app over Wi-Fi | iCloud meters you monthly for it |
Most people searching "how to back up my iPhone without iTunes" want jobs two and three: real files on the Mac, updated automatically. That's exactly the gap iTunes left and Finder never filled.
Getting the plug-in-and-done workflow back
This is the part where we tell you what we built, so read it as the honest pitch it is. BackupMaster exists to be the iTunes sync that should have shipped in 2019:
- Plug in your iPhone — or pick it from the device list over Wi-Fi once you've paired — and it shows what's on the phone with real sizes: photos and videos.
- Tick what you want, click once, and everything lands in plain folders on your Mac at full quality — HEIC, ProRAW and 4K originals untouched.
- Every backup after the first copies only what's new, and an interrupted run resumes where it stopped — even over Wi-Fi while the phone charges in another room.
Nothing touches the internet, there's no account, and right now the whole app is free for a limited time — so you can watch it work with your own phone. When early access ends it'll be $20 once — the way software used to work.
If you're coming from iTunes on Windows
One honest note: BackupMaster is Mac-only — it's built natively for macOS 14 and later on Apple Silicon. On Windows, Apple's own Apple Devices app covers device backups the way Finder does on the Mac, with the same limitation: you get a restore image, not your files.
If you use both platforms, the pattern that works is simple: let the Mac hold your real file archive, and treat the Windows machine's device backup as your pre-upgrade safety net.