iPhone 6 "Restoring from iCloud Backup" forever

Thanks Yefchak for trying to explain, but your steps don't work. When I plug my iPhone in, iTunes comes up automatically. If I then select my iPhone under devices, I will see a "Backups" section, but in there the "Back Up Now" and "Restore Backup..." buttons are greyed out. It does not matter if I select "iCloud" or "This computer", those buttons still remain greyed out. I do see that a sync starts, but the sync seems to never finish (it hangs saying "Waiting for items to copy". I assume the backup and restore buttons are greyed out because my iPhone thinks it is restoring from iCloud (which it's been doing now for about 6 days). I finally was contacted by the Apple support person and we're going to work on this tomorrow morning. Wish me luck.

this is how I fixed problem. Hold down all apps that are still waiting for download and delete from phone(make sure you check all folders) Go to store and re download all apps deleted. All the apps I replaced still had the data saved from before and the phone was no longer in restore mode.

I was able to fix this by connecting to iTunes with cable as others have suggested but rather than backup/restore I upgraded to 8.0.2. Once that was complete it finished the iCloud restore on its own.

The phone wouldn't start the upgrade on its own until the restore was complete but iTunes didn't have that restriction.

I had the same problem, and I switched off the "Find My iPhone" feature (by Settings > iCloud, then tap to turn off Find My [device]) - and immediately the backup was finished and the warning messages gone. Yay!

Hi i have had the same issue with restoring from icloud.

I restored from itunes back up and my apps have all installed but my photos have not downloaded.

It says 'Downloading' at the bottom of the screen in photos but nothing is downloading. ! have left it for an hour and still no photos have come up.

In the moments section it lists all the dates and places where the photos were taken but where the photos are its blank squares.

Has anybody experienced this or know a fix?

Your problem is a little different than mine but the solution might be the same. I had my iPhone's lock screen saying "Restoring From iCloud" for about a week. Working with Apple support, the final solution was to do a "Settings -> General -> Reset -> Reset All Content and Settings" and then restore from a local backup I had on my iMac. It might have worked for me to restore from iCloud again, but I didn't want to bother with that, not so long as there is no way to see what is going on during the restore as I would never know if it's progressing or stuck or what. Maybe a higher level support person would have been able to tell me how/where I can see what is going on during a restore, but as it was, I just wanted to get past this issue and get on with my life. If you have valid backups that are not too old, other than the those in iCloud, I would try the full reset and then restore from one of those backups.

I had the same problem. Had already erased and sold my iPhone 5s and was left with a backup three days old so didn't want to to restore my iPhone 6 that was stuck with the message for three days. All apps and photos were downloaded so I hit "stop backup" in the iCloud backup menu. Message disappeared and now that it's backing up my iPhone 6 the size of the backup is the same as my previous iPhone 5s backup so everything had been downloaded.

Really annoying bug and Apple should fix this ASAP. Nothing like saying welcome to your new phone as not getting something as essential as a backup to work. Apple really needs to get the basics right, their software quality control has been HORRIBLE as of late.

I did a soft reset with the lock and home button and it finally cleared, working great now.

I had the seemingly-stuck "Restoring from iCloud Backup" lock screen message, and after 8 days it has finally completed without my doing anything (at least, without doing anything that worked; I tried a bunch of things). I had resisted doing anything to stop the restore because there is no easy way to see that ALL the data has finished restoring, or to see what the restore is doing, exactly, and I didn't want to lose any data. After several days I noticed that by looking at Settings > General > Usage > Manage Storage, I could see that the space taken up by my photos was slowly increasing. I started taking a screenshot of the data information each night, and confirming in the morning that the numbers were continuing to rise. Moreover, I could see that additional "new" photos (actually very old ones that just hadn't restored yet) were continuing to appear in the Recently Added album in the Photos app as recently as today. Finally, late this morning, 8 days after beginning the restore, the lock screen message has disappeared and I am able to backup the phone and upgrade to iOS 8.1 without interrupting anything. In my case, the photo library seems to have been the last to finish. I have 22 GB of photos on the phone, and my internet connection is not all that fast. Had I interrupted the restore (either explicitly, or by forcing a new backup to iTunes and restoring to that) I would have lost some of these pictures, which I found unacceptable. So, if you can stand it, I would recommend patience. I'm not saying nobody's phone is stuck, but mine wasn't. It just hadn't finished yet.

I think iOS 8 is the first version that gives you a lock screen message to say that a restore is ongoing. In the past, my restores may have taken just as long, but I didn't notice. I hope in future Apple can add some progress information (percent restored, perhaps); as things stand we are left to wait and to have faith. In my case, faith turned out to be justified, but it wasn't easy to maintain.

d.

I was having the same issue but not nearly for as long as some of you guys here. Maybe about 5 hours total, it's possible mine would have just gone away. The symptoms were:

1) Two apps (PayPal and WW) were not completing

2) The Update was waiting for restore to complete

I did the following two things:

1) Disabled "Find My iPhone"

2) Deleted the two offending apps and installed them from the app store (this was kinda slow)

3) Restarted the phone

4) Waited about 20 minutes

And the problem just worked itself out.

And how can you tell which applications haven't finished restoring?

I deleted Find My Phone, & straight away it completed the restore. Then I reinstalled the app.

The ones that are not completed look grayed out. You have to look through your phone and folders to find them which is a pain. It took me a good 10 minutes of looking around but I have over 300 apps on my phone ... I may have a problem with app hoarding.

I had the same problem, first turned off find my iphone (someone wrote that it helped ) , then ran and close pages (also someone wrote that it helped ) , and success, after 24 hour backup completed successfully 🙂