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Set a backup alarm on iPhone

A snooze is not a backup. A snooze happens because you heard the alarm and pressed something; a backup is for the mornings you did not hear it at all, or dealt with it in your sleep and have no memory of it. They cover different failures, and only one of them is insurance.

Set one by hand in the Clock app

1. Open Clock › Alarms and tap +.
2. Set it for a few minutes after your real alarm — see the spacing below.
3. Label it “Backup”. At 6:33, half awake, the label is how you know which of the two you are looking at and whether you are late.
4. Give it the same repeat days as the first one. This is where manual backups quietly break: a backup set to weekdays behind a real alarm that runs Monday to Saturday is not a backup on Saturday.
5. Choose a different sound. Half asleep, a different tone is what tells you “this is the second one” rather than “this is the first one again”.
6. Save, and check that both alarms are switched on.

How far apart to set them

It depends on which failure you are insuring against, and they are not the same problem.

• 2–3 minutes if the risk is not hearing it. A first alarm often lifts you into lighter sleep even when you keep no memory of it, so a second attempt very soon after has more to work with than one twenty minutes later.
• 5–10 minutes if the risk is stopping it and going back to sleep. That needs a gap long enough that you have actually dropped off and can be woken again — but not so long that the backup is simply a second oversleep. Ten minutes is about the outside edge of useful.

Never put them on the same minute

Worth knowing whether or not you use two apps: if two alarms are set for the same minute, iOS picks between them unpredictably, and a single press of a physical button dismisses every alarm currently alerting. Two alarms sharing a minute are therefore closer to one alarm than to two. Stagger them — a ring three minutes later has nothing to compete with.

And mind your snooze length

Snoozing the first alarm does nothing to the second. If you snooze at 6:30 and the backup is set for 6:35, it fires in the middle of your snooze and you will learn to distrust it. If you snooze deliberately, set the backup past the snooze length — the Clock app’s snooze is nine minutes.

Where to put the second alarm

• Same device. Simplest, and it covers the failures that are about you rather than the device: not hearing it, dismissing it in your sleep, a glance at the screen lowering the volume.
• A second device across the room. A stronger version of the same idea if your real problem is stopping an alarm without waking up, because it makes you stand. The trade is that you now have two alarms to keep in sync in two places, and an old iPad only helps if it is charged.
• A second alarm app on the same phone. Workable, with one condition: never the same minute, for the reason above.

The drawback of a manual backup, said plainly

It does not cancel itself.

On the great majority of mornings you get up at the first alarm — and the second one goes off anyway. Next to a sleeping partner. While you are in the shower and cannot reach it. On the train. In the first meeting of the day. It is a small cost each time and a large one cumulatively, because after a couple of weeks of it you start switching the backup off the night before “just this once” — and a backup you pre-canceled is not a backup at all. That is the failure mode of the manual method, and it is worth naming before you build a habit on top of it.

There are three imperfect answers:

• Live with it, and make the backup’s sound short and mild so the cost of a false alarm is small.
• Cancel it by hand every morning, which works exactly as long as your discipline does — and the morning it fails is a morning you were rushing, which is the morning you needed it.
• Keep the gap short, 2–3 minutes, so you are usually still within reach of the device and canceling it is one movement rather than a hunt.

Keep the pair in sync

Every time you change your wake-up time you have to change both. The morning you move one and forget the other is the morning the backup rings forty minutes early, or does not exist. If you take one habit from this page, make it this: whenever you touch your alarm, look at the alarm below it too.

Before you rely on either of them

A backup covers a failure of the first alarm. It does not cover a setting that silences both — a ringer at zero, Change with Buttons or Attention Aware Features, or vibration switched off device-wide all apply to every alarm on the device equally. Set those first, then test the pair once from where the device actually sleeps.