Apple Watch Won’t Restore From Backup

Hi,

This entire process of updating my two year old watch has been a complete nightmare. I have an apple watch series 3 and was attempting to update to watch OS7.2. The update wouldn’t download because it claimed I didn’t have storage space, even though the only app I use was only taking up 50MB. So I have no clue how I used 3GB on the stupid thing.

Anyways, after trying numerous times, had to unpair the dang thing with my phone. This reset it but kept a backup. Then I tried to repair and each time it told me I had to update my watch. Multiple times, the update would get stuck or would say it couldn’t download because my iPhone wasn’t connected to the internet, even though it was.

After FINALLY getting my watch to pair and update, I attempted to now set it up and restore from backup.

I went through all the steps and my watch loaded the backup for a while. I looked at the screen when it was done thinking I would see my watch face, but instead I was prompted to pair and set up my watch. AGAIN. The watch app on my phone had defaulted to “pair a watch,” acting like I hadn’t paired my watch at all. And the watch face itself was flashing the usual set up screen in multiple languages, telling me to pair it with an iPhone to set it up.

So now I’m trying again. And it’s literally taking forever. It’s currently been frozen on the “apple watch basics” screen for 10 minutes: I’m scared I’m going to go through the process of restoring it from backup only to have to do it a THIRD time because for some reason the stupid backup doesn’t want to stay on my watch. Or that it just won’t work and it will be frozen forever.

Can someone help me with this? I’ve explained it as best I can. I’ve already checked apple supports various topics and none of the questions pertain to my issue. My watch is literally completely unusable until I can get it paired, set up again, and restored through my phone.

Again, I have an apple watch series 3 running the latest version of watch OS. My phone is an iPhone XR that’s about a year and a half old and I’m running the latest version of iOS14 on it.