Cannot transfer backup to a new iPhone 12 Pro. Not enough space error

Around 6 hours spent in vain. The backup for iPhone does not work. Apple is useless. Cannot make their software work!

My old phone is iPhone XS Max with 256 Gb. I've been deleting data to keep in under 128 GB (which my new iPhone 12 Pro has), then I lowered the bar to 110 GB, then to 100 GB, eventually to 80 GB. Each time I spent a lot of my time to find data to delete. Nothing worked! There is no way I can transfer my data to my new phone.

I spent much of my time repeating "transfer your data" from iPhone to the new iPhone process directly from the phone. Each time the same error after minutes of trying "not enough space to transfer data". Why not enough space if iPhone Storage usage shows 80 GB and the new iPhone has 128GB???

Funny part, then I called Apple. They advised backing up via the computer. Firstly, I couldn't find space on my Mac. It has 170 GB free, but complained "not enough space" to back up iPhone. Then I switched to PC with extra space. There I managed to create a backup which was roughly 170 GB!!! (while showing "using 80 GB on the device"). Of course, it didn't work for my new iPhone 12 Pro.

Then I decided to remove all Photos. My guess was that iCloud photo library might be the cause. Yes "Optimize storage" was selected, without it all my Photos would lots of space. I turned off iCloud and checked "remove photos from device". It seems that major number of photos remained on the phone. Actually, used space increased to 170 GB. All other checkboxes for Photos/iCloud didn't make any difference in terms of storage usage (General/iPhone Storage).

Called Apple again, they asked the same questions again and again. Finally, advised me to turn on iCloud for photos, wait till the sync finishes, then try backing up again. The process shows still 1% (after a couple of hours).

While waiting I tried to restore from the backup I created earlier today on the same old iPhone XS Max 256 GB. The backup didn't work for the same device!!! I cannot restore from a backup created from the same device! That's nonsense.

It is great, you, Apple, can make nice animations and art, even turn on nice music while waiting for the support specialist, but you totally useless with the real stuff, the software your devices use. It does not work.

The only option I have for now is to start the device as "new iPhone" which will add me some pain to set everything up. And, I will lose some data which is not in iCloud. request 101221201737

iPhone 12 Pro, iOS 14

Posted on Oct 28, 2020 6:52 AM

Top-ranking reply

Hickmo

Level 1

4 points

Posted on Feb 3, 2021 3:20 PM

I found a solution to this.

My scenario was moving from a 128GB to 64GB phone.

The old phone was using around 80GB of space so I used the optimise photos to offload the high res photos to iCloud.

The phone and iTunes both then showed the space used by photos reduced and the phone space used to around 50GB total.

So in theory the transfer should work. However both the direct phone to phone transfer and iTunes backup and restore both kept failing with out of space errors.

Also the iTunes backup file was still around 80GB.

I determined that the photos had not been offloaded to iCloud even though the space reports said it had.

Basically the photos only get offloaded if the iPhone starts running out of space. The space usage monitor is not accurate.

To force the phone to offload the photos you need to fill up the phone storage. I did this by downloading lots of moves on prime/Netflix etc. I filled up almost the whole phone.

once done I then deleted prime/Netflix to delete the apps and data.

Then I could transfer the phone to the new phone.

in summary the storage usage monitor is not accurate when optimised photos is enabled. The phone only offloads the high res photos if the photo starts running out of space.

This is really poor by apple. The space storage monitor is not accurate at all.

But I hope this helps other people as I wasted days of time trying various other things, until I realised the cause and solution.

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Cannot transfer backup to a new iPhone 12 Pro. Not enough space error

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