backup solutions for the iPad without computer

I have a friend, who was born in 1920, who has an an iPad. He loves the thing but doesn't understand the concept of backup dispite my best efforts. He just doesn't want to spend any more money. He does not own a computer and thus has no way of backing up his data. I have been searching for a solution, may be a program that would allow him to back up to an external harddrive. Any ideas?

What is it that you feel he needs to backup? Is he downloading music on iTunes? Creating docs in the iPad version of iWork? Regardless, as much as I recommend backing up any important data, with the iPad it's all solid state - it's not like you're going to lose an HDD.

You can't backup the iPad without iTunes. Period, end of story.

So he has no way of getting OS updates or anything either. An iPad really needs a "home base" computer...

tiger roach said:

So he has no way of getting OS updates or anything either. An iPad really needs a "home base" computer...

Click to expand...

That's right. It's really not designed to be a standalone computing device, it's supposed to be a companion to a full-blown computer of some sort.

tiger roach said:

So he has no way of getting OS updates or anything either. An iPad really needs a "home base" computer...

Click to expand...

So, my question is, how did he initialize the device?

When I powered mine on for the first time, it demanded iTunes.

Did he have them initialize it at the Apple store for him and he just walked away?

If he doesn't want to spend any more money, then there really isn't much you can do to help him. As long as he stays un-jail broken, he probably won't need to a backup... probably... if he is lucky! He made it to 90 so it sounds like he is already pretty lucky!

Do you have a PC/Mac you could plug it into?

Vroomer said:

So, my question is, how did he initialize the device?

When I powered mine on for the first time, it demanded iTunes.

Did he have them initialize it at the Apple store for him and he just walked away?

Click to expand...

I'll bet that's what has happened.

I have an iPad that was issued to me by work - the first one I got had a dead line of pixels on the screen and I had to take it into the Apple store - they initialized the new one at the store (granted it was worthless to me until I got home and restored everything back onto the replacement).

So either a comp with iTunes to sync it to, or only use programs that will sync to a cloud storage area and have each of those programs keep their data updated in the cloud (since apps run in a sandbox environment each app would have to be responsible for its own data)

As mentioned before, it's not designed to be a stand alone computing device (although considering it's capabilities, it really could be for some people)

Can you upload to Dropbox on an iPad?