iCloud backup vs Itunes backup

I just wanted to add my experience as I was looking up info on my lost voicemails. I don't really need them, but I'm pretty anal about my data so it was a little disappointing to lose them, but overall iCloud did it's job.

This past weekend I lost my iPhone 4 in a cab. First mistake I probably called it too many times, by the time I got Find My iPhone loaded on a friend's iPod touch off a very unreliable hotspot, they had already shut it off. It still says my message and remote lock are pending :-( But I digress...

Decided that if I'm extending my AT&T contract another 2 years and possibly missing out on the iPhone 5 when it first comes out (which I was holding out for) that I may as well cough up the extra $100 for the 4S. Anyway, I was away from home for the weekend when this happened, and I was kicking myself for never syncing with my laptop because I knew there was no way to get media that wasn't purchased (which is about 90% of my music) from iCloud. Then I started to panic because when I tried to restore from icloud on the initial setup it signed into my account, but then on the backup list screen it said there was none! I couldn't remember the last time I forced a local backup on my desktop, so I thought I almost lost a lot of notes to myself, photos, etc. But then all I had to do was setup as a new phone, update to iOS 5.1, then redo the setup. Seems the restore device must match the firmware of the backup. Anyway, almost all of my data was there including most in-app data. Only app I noticed so far was myAT&T app which allows you to save multiple logins, but I figured that was just a security thing that such data wouldn't get backed up. Only other thing, as I mentioned, was voicemail. I had a lot of saved messages and they were all gone. I'm pretty sure they do get backed up in iTunes though, because I seem to remember carrying over some messages from my 3G when I originally got the 4. Anyway, I just came here to see if anyone knew anything about how that works, possibly they are backed up and I have to do something else to retrieve them? Maybe something about setting up as a new phone before I could restore messed it up?

Anyway, thanks for reading my rambling!

I believe voicemail is backed up. It was for me when I had to restore from itunes after switching out a defective iphone. Maybe try doing the restore again, or sometimes you have to log into your voicemail account. but it should prompt you for that automatically.

@fclairmont - Thank you very much for your warning!

@fclairmont, Thanks for the message on this! I think it would be helpful to include more details, to know what to watch out for?

For example, from what I understand backing up to iCloud only backs up your iPhone's data, not your iTunes music library that's on your Mac or PC. The songs that were deleted, were they purchased songs from iTunes? or ripped from CDs?

Were your problems with about iTunes Match?