I accidentally backed up my iPhone to an old back up from 2019 when trying to update my iTunes and don’t know how to recover my photos, contacts, messages, or anything else. And my iCloud storage was full so not everything was backed up to the iCloud. Can this be rectified somehow?
iPhone XR, iOS 14
It won’t be easy. Do you have a newer backup on your computer, or was 2 years ago the last time you backed up? Did you have iCloud sync enabled (that is not the same as iCloud Backup)? You can check that by logging in to https://iCloud.com and seeing what data is available.
For photos are you sure you didn’t do ANY of these ways of preserving photos and videos?
It won’t be easy. Do you have a newer backup on your computer, or was 2 years ago the last time you backed up? Did you have iCloud sync enabled (that is not the same as iCloud Backup)? You can check that by logging in to https://iCloud.com and seeing what data is available.
For photos are you sure you didn’t do ANY of these ways of preserving photos and videos?
If your iCloud storage was full, the backup that is there may not restore as it may be corrupted. Similarly for other things that sync to iCloud like contacts, notes, messages (if you use messages in iCloud). Whenever a storage system is full, then new data that is trying to be written there can result in corrupted data in your account. Your incoming iCloud email also will be rejected by the mail server.
All you can do is try again to restore using whatever is the most recent backup shown to you when starting the restore. Your sync’d data like contacts and photos will then re-sync to the device, again though only what is there to sync will do so.
If I understood you correctly, then you restored your iPhone from an older backup file (2019) by using iTunes on your computer. You do not have a current backup on iCloud. Do you have a more recent backup on your computer? If you do not have another and more recent backup anywhere then you have nothing to restore from. Your iPhone is currently restored from your 2019 backup and that is all you have. This means that what you have now, on your iPhone, is active and there are no other options to utilize.
Axel F.
If you overwrote the old backup on iTunes and do not have a "good" one on iCloud I am afraid that your data is limited to what is now available on those backups.
Recover data & restore phone
