How restore an iPhone from a backup

When you move to a new iPhone you don’t want to spend ages setting everything up from scratch to get the apps, data and settings just the way you like them. That’s why restoring from a backup is so convenient: one quick tap, a bit of a wait, and you’re good to go.

The same is true if a phone malfunctions badly, or is bricked. Knowing you can wipe the iPhone and recover your photos, documents and data easily from an iCloud or a computer backup is reassuring.

A backup is also an insurance that, should your iPhone be lost or stolen, you won’t lose everything on it. It’s easier to replace the device than the memories and other data stored on it.

Yes, backups are an essential part of the modern digital life, which is why we put together our How to back up an iPhone or iPad guide. But knowing how to restore an iPhone from that backup is just as important. Read on for our complete guide.

Step 1: Find your iPhone backup

First things first: make sure you’ve got a backup that you can restore from. Crucially, this backup needs to be recent enough to include the apps and data you want to keep, and/or sufficiently old that it happened before the technical problem if you are trying to fix a faulty iPhone.

There are two places you may find a backup, as long as you are making backups. One is iCloud, to which you may need to subscribe to get enough space. The other method depends on whether you are using a Mac or a PC: on a Mac iPhone backups are made via the Finder (in macOS Catalina and later) and on a PC (and older versions of macOS) they are made via iTunes.

To see iCloud backups follow these steps:

Open Settings on your iPhone or iPad.

Tap your name/face at the top.

Now tap iCloud.

Tap Manage Account Storage.

Tap Backups.

Tap a backup to see when it happened.

Computer backups

To see backups made on a Mac follow these steps:

Plug in your iPhone.

Open the Finder.

Click on your device in the sidebar.

In the General tab click Manage Backups.

If there are any backups you will see them here. (You’ll also see if iCloud backups are being made).

The process is similar in iTunes:

Open iTunes.

Click iTunes in the top bar and select Preferences.

Select the tab labelled Devices. The date and time of each backup is listed.

Should I back up first?

If you are wanting to make a backup that you can recover to a new iPhone, and you’re not sure you’ve got a sufficiently recent backup, play it safe by doing another backup of the old device right now.

If you are hoping to solve an issue with your iPhone that started recently and you have an old iPhone backup you can recover don’t back up your iPhone, the old backup may be your best bet in getting your iPhone working again. This applies if you want to recover your iPhone to a time before you installed a beta version of iOS or even if you want to recover an older version of iOS after experiencing problems with the latest version.

Step 2: Wipe your iPhone

If you are just recovering the backup to a brand-new iPhone, or one that has already been wiped you can skip this step.

However, if you are trying to troubleshoot an issue with your iPhone, want to remove a beta, or if you want to wipe the iPhone you have to pass it on to a new owner, you’ll need to wipe it first. YOu can’t restore an iCloud backup to an iPhone without erasing the contents first.

This process is easier if you are recovering an old back to an iPhone that is running the same version of iOS that you intend to run. It gets a lot harder if you are trying to restore an older version of iOS, especially if you are running a beta version of iOS–in which case you may need to plug it into a Mac, force the iPhone into recovery mode and restore it that way. We discuss cover this here: How to remove an iOS beta from your iPhone.

Normally resetting your iPhone so that you can recover a recent backup is a simple process and hopefully one of these two options will work:

On an iPhone:

Open Settings.

General.

Transfer or Reset iPhone. Erase All Content and Settings.

Erase and then work through the various steps.

Your iPhone should restart with the Welcome screen if this process has worked.

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