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Can I restore an iOS 14.8 backup of an iPad that was made just before this iPad was upgraded to 15.5? It turns out that the new home screen stuff, stacks, widgets and the like are not to our liking and we don't have screenshots of the previous layouts.
TIA for any and all answers, I'm not a "Mac person" but am the resident tech support for others in the household...
iPad (6th gen) WiFi
You can only restore a backup that was made for the version that you have currently installed on your iPad - or to a later version of the OS. Put another way, you cannot restore a backup to device that has an earlier version of iOS/iPadOS than created the backup.
As such, if intending to restore iPadOS14.8 backup, you can restore the backup to a device with iPadOS15.x installed.
Wow! Thank you for the unexpectedly quick response. Since that wasn't the answer I expected please let me confirm my new ideas.
To set the scene, my wife has an "mid 2011" iMac running 10.13.6, I have a "late 2013" running 10.14.6. I made a backup of her iPad (described above) right before the upgrade to iPadOS 15.5 from 14.8. This was made by cable connecting the tablet to my Mac and using iTunes.
After considering your reply, I'm thinking about first backing up her iPad (still running 15.5) to HER Mac via cable and iTunes. Then connecting the tablet to MY Mac and performing the "downgrading" restore of 14.8.
Does this make sense? Must I do any prep to the iPad before the restore? Should we let "well enough alone"?
Thanks, again for your input.
Dave
You can restore the data within the backup - but you cannot roll-back the currently installed version of iPadOS. Operating system updates are one-way.
Ah, that's what I thought, thanks for your help. Guess we'll live with what is.
Restoring previous release iOS backup
