My Android phone died, so I transferred its data to an old iPhone 6. Before doing that, I backed up the iPhone data to iCloud, and then did a factory reset (which is necessary for using Move To Ios to transfer data from an Android phone to an iPhone). If I download the iPhone backup, will it overwrite (and erase) the Android data I transferred?
[Re-Titled by Moderator]
iPhone 6s, iOS 15
Thanks for your replies. I was hoping to be able to retrieve my contacts that were on the iPhone before I reset it. It appears from your answers that I can't retrieve that information from the iPhone backup without overwriting the more recent data the I transferred from the Android phone. I'm guessing that I should have backed up contacts to iCloud before resetting the phone, which I didn't do. Is that correct?
If the contacts were synched to iCloud, you should get them back to your restored "new" phone once you activate it.
If not...poof..
Log in to your iCloud account to see if the contacts are there. You can do that from a computer.
Hey Eric,
I totally understand
your dilemma. I’ve faced a similar issue when switching from an Android device
to an iPhone, and the process can be a bit tricky when it comes to managing
backups.
If you restore your iPhone from the iCloud backup, it will overwrite
the data currently on the iPhone, including any data transferred from your
Android phone using the "Move to iOS" app. The iCloud backup will
essentially replace what’s on your device with the state of the phone when the
backup was made. This is common practice with iPhones and any type of restore
operation, and the same principle applies whether you’re moving data from an
Android device or backing up iPhone data to iCloud.
To avoid losing your
Android data, I would recommend you my personally well tried, following steps.
1-Backup your Android data on the cloud or an external
drive.
2-Manually check what’s been transferred from the Android phone
to the iPhone. If the data is important and you're concerned about losing it,
try to preserve it separately before proceeding.
3-When you restore from iCloud, you can choose to selectively restore data like contacts, photos,
etc., without wiping everything out, but it's important to be careful during
this process.
As I was going through similar data management tasks on my devices in Germany, I realized that timing
such operations, like transferring or backing up data usually take longer time than
expected, especially when there are multiple steps involved. For example, when I transferred my data between devices, I used a working time calculator to log how much time I spent, backing up and restoring files.
This helped me manage my expectations and ensure that I wasn’t losing time on
unexpected issues, especially during the iCloud restore process.
Hope this helps!
Best Regards,
Ayyan
[Edited by Moderator]
Thanks for the replies (especially to Ayyan for the long explanation.) I did not sync the previous iPhone data before I did the factory reset. So it does seem that I could have contacts from both phones (both the Android that died and the previous data from the iPhone) by (1) syncing the current important data (which was transferred from the Android) to iCloud, then (2) doing a factory reset, then (3) restoring the full backup I made of the iPhone before I transferred the data from the Android, then (4) backing up the important data from that iPhone backup (contacts, photos, etc.), then (5) doing another factory reset, then (6) re-transferring the data from the dead Android, and then, as I understand it, the previous iPhone data that I had synced would automatically re-sync to the phone. Very complicated.
Yes.
Yes. The only way to restore a backup is to erase the device.
Will restoring iPhone backup erase Android data?
