health kit backup

Health (or Health Kit) has a lot of promise, and its security/privacy features seem well thought out. Mostly.

The data cannot be stored separate from an encrypted backup of the iPhone (and presumably the Apple Watch).

First, Apple should notify users before they restore their iPhone or get a replacement that none of their data from Health will be saved in a standard backup to iTunes or to iCloud. The only way to retain the data is to have an encrypted backup in iTunes.

Second, this means that if you are ever advised to restore your iPhone and set up as new and then load apps, messages, photos, music, … manually, that the Health data would be completely inaccessible. Since Apple sometimes advises users to do that, they are (presumably unintentionally) advising users to choose a method that will cause them to lose all of the data that has been stored in Health.

I think that the only data that would be recoverable would be that data that was shared with another app. But then, it would not be imported back to Health, which would render it essentially impossible to share with apps loaded subsequently.

My steps, flights climbed, and distance for three months exist in an encrypted backup, but I set up my replacement iPhone from an unencrypted backup; so now, either I revert to the encrypted backup of a week ago and hope to manually restore the data added in the last week, or I sacrifice the three months of data. Sleep data shared with Sleep Cycle app has been retained.