Doing an iPhone reset in recovery mode on slow internet connections- monitoring the download

I was forced to reset my mother-in-law's new iPhone SE when she somehow managed to set a passcode which she could not remember. I followed the recommended steps through doing a factory reset from my MacBookPro. Since I am in a rural area with slow download speeds, I watched the progress bar crawl as it estimated 4 hours for the 8.2 Gb download. The last I checked it had done maybe 600Mb, but then later the device had disconnected (there was no iPhone listed in my connected devices).

The information I found, e.g. My phone is on recovery mode and my compu… - Apple Community suggested quickly resetting to recovery mode and continuing, but the next three attempts failed to even display a progress bar, and then the next one did but it suggested it has started over.

With some kind help from Apple support and in what I did later on revealed to me that the slow download was still happening in the background, even without seeing a progress bar. And there was no need to reattach the iPhone in recovery mode until the download was done.

So how did I know the download was in progress? First of all you have to go to the folder where the downloads are stored (not in your Downloads folder). This is found in ~/Library/iTunes/iPhone Software Updates - from Finder menu hold option key and use the Go menu to access the normally hidden Library directory.

The file will be something named like iPhone14,6_18.11_22B92_Restore.ipsw.download while it is in progress- when done the .download disappears. Now I kept looking at the Get Info on the file, or just looking in the finder, and the file size did not change while downloading, hence I thought the download was borked, and I kept restarting the whole process.

What I learned from observation was if I clicked off this file, clicked on any other folder, waited a minute, and clicked back on the download file, the file size increased like by .2 Gb (really slow internet!). This told me I could let it just download overnight. In the morning the file name had lost the .download extension AND it was a full 8.2Gb.

Then when I attached the iPhone in recovery mode, the update started, and I had restored the phone. I could nor reply to this discussion My phone is on recovery mode and my compu… - Apple Community but wanted to leave this in case someone else is in the situation I was. The documentation and most posts I read were not clear, you just have to trust the 8.2 Gb download is happening, although the OS gives you no inducation if the iPhone Recovery 15 minute timer cuts its connection.