iCloud restored wrong backup copy of my old iPhone to my new iPhone. It picked my wife's backup copy instead of mine. I had to rush to the AT&T store to buy a cable to connect my iPhone to my PC. Then, I had to reset my iPhone, and restore the backup copy on my PC to my new iPhone. It took hours to transfer my contacts, pictures, and content from my old iPhone to my new iPhone. That is unacceptable.
That is correct. It uses the name of the PHONE. As found in Settings/General/About-Name. And if 2 phones have the same name then there is only one backup that is the backup of the most recently backed up phone.
Yes, it is unacceptable that you didn’t plan ahead and assign different names to the devices that were backed up to iCloud. Or if you had, you chose the wrong name.
But you could just set it up again and restore the correct backup.
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Well, Apple doesn’t think its a bug. And when you set up a new phone Apple can’t read your mind and figure out which phone’s backup you want to restore. And actually, there is a dropdown of backups when you restore the backup, which you probably didn’t notice. But you can always tell Apple they are doing it wrong: https://apple.com/feedback. There’s not point in telling other users in this user-to-user forum; we can’t do anything about it. And, BTW, I have never had a problem selecting the backup to restore from the dropdown among my 4 iOS devices.
When I backed up my wife's iPhone using iTunes on Windows 10 Pro, iTunes did not prompt me to enter a name for the backed up file. Neither did it prompt me to enter a name for my iPhone. Before each backup, I logged off the iCloud for my wife and logged in as myself to backup my iPhone. For my wife, I logged off the iCloud and logged on as her, to ensure that the iCloud was connected to her credentials for her backup of her iPhone. So, in each case, I made sure the iCloud was connected to the right person and phone. In each case, iTunes did not prompt me for a name for each backup. So, when I was ready to backup my iPhone to the iCloud, my credentials were the only one active on my desktop and iTunes gave me the last time it was backed up to make sure it was the current one that I just backed up. When I proceeded to perform the restore to my new iPhone, it only asked me if I wanted to use the current backup. It did not ask me the name of the backup. Nor, did it ask me the time of the backup. So, your comments were incorrect, and I did not appreciate your insult. I am not stupid. I have been a programmer for 42 years. I think I know what I am doing. So, there is a BUG in the iCloud backup and restore that needs to be FIXED.
Each iPhone has a unique name and/or ID. They were different. So, the iCloud restore should have recognized my wife's iPhone and my iPhone were different. It did not validate the iPhone name or ID or phone number. Instead, it restored the 'latest' backup to the wrong iPhone, which is why I believe there is a BUG in validation. Even the customer care representative at AT&T recognized that this was a problem, and they told me to RESET my iPhone and use the PC backup file only; do not use the iCloud restore. So, there is a BUG in the iCloud backup and restore software, which is causing problems in the field, and it needs to be FIXED. The Apple software development team needs to reproduce this error and FIX the software in the iCloud backup/restore code.
How do you fix iCloud backup/restore failures when transferring data from old to new iPhone?
