Q: Forgotten encryption  password how to reset

Tips to remember it here:

http://support.apple.com/kb/TS5162

If the backup you're trying to restore from is encrypted, you will not be able to use that backup if you can't remember the encrypted backup passcode.

If on a Mac, & you elected to save the passcode to your Keychain, you can recover the passcode from your Keychain. Otherwise, your backup data is unrecoverable.

While you can continue to sync/backup, if you can't remember it & want to remove it, you'll have to delete your existing backups, & restore your phone as a new device. Your data will be unrecoverable.

You delete your existing backups here: iTunes>Preferences>Devices.

I managed to reset it but ONLY if you are on Mac, your password was stored in the keychains and have a previous Time Machine backup!

My scenario goes like this:

I did a backup for my iPhone 4S which was on iOS 8.1, the backup password was stored in my macbook keychain, then I restored the iPhone with iOS 8.1.2 succesfully but when I wanted to import the backup, iTunes kept asking for a password, I can swear that there is no way that I could have forgotten my password, at the same time for some weird reason that I don't know, the password was deleted from the keychain!

After almost a day of stressing about it, I tried all kind of fixes on the forums: editing the backup .plist, typing 1234 or 0000, using the passcode, the macbook, iTunes or Apple ID password... but nothing worked since I remember that I set a different password for the backup encryption.

So I thought about this fix using a Time Machine Backup:

1. Go to your Library folder
2. Quit iTunes
3. Disconnect your iPhone
4. Select those folders to restore from a previous Mac backup (The date of this backup should be a date when you didn't have this iphone encryption password problem)
   • ~/Library/Application Support/MobileSync
   • ~/Library/Keychains
   • ~/Library/iTunes
5. Restart your Mac
6. Open iTunes, connect your iPhone and restore its backup, or if you want the password, go to Keychains and search by the iPhone's name
7. If it doesn't seem to work, try to restore all the content of ~/Library instead of just the three folders mentioned above

For my case, my last backup was on December 5, 2014, and I restored it today (December 12, 2014), meaning I lost like a week of data, but that's way better than losing weeks or months of data.

I hope this fix will work for you.

Regards